Albatwitch – Only Dead Birds Sing Over the Graves of Fallen Kings

I have no idea what to make of this.  Like, legitimately no goddamn clue.  Albatwitch, apparently from “parts unknown,” though my guess is somewhere in backwater Pennsylvania, has totally stumped me.  Their facebook describes them as “blackened swamp crust noise drone folk,” and what the hell else could Only Dead Birds Sing Over the Graves of Fallen Kings even be?

This is just a weird fucking record, through and through.  About half of the tracks are some guy playing banjo, and the opener is partially sung in German.  And then there’s stuff like “A.M.P.I.C.,” which is the most necro sound imaginable, drum machines pounding under guitars that sound like they’re being played through a boombox.

And what the hell is an albatwitch, anyway?  According to this website, it’s a sort of dwarf bigfoot that haunted a very specific part of rural Pennsylvania, prior to its extinction in the 20^th century.  The name, somehow, derives from “apple-snitch,” as the little things apparently liked to steal apples and throw them at picnickers.  Seems apt for a black metal band.

And is this album actually about hydrofracking?  Well, the last two tracks are titled “Frack-ture” and “Black Waters Rise,” and the former seems to contain a long sample of testimony about the deleterious health effects that come from natural gas drilling using hydraulic fracturing, so I guess it’s fair to say at least part of it is.  But then again, there’s also someone screeching over top of everything, so I have no idea what this is actually about.  Could it just be a concept album about bigfoot?  Possibly.

So is it consistent?  Does it hold together?  Not really.  To be frank, the album sounds like two dudes banging out a bunch of noise in a shed, which is probably exactly what it is.

But here’s the thing: none of that is bad.  The record is so weird, so singular, it seems to be exactly what Brian Magar and “timeMOTHeye” were going for, with none of the compromises that come with outside expectations.  Many of the original black metal acts were misanthropic teenagers in bedrooms with no semblance of an audience for their work, and a similar lack of anticipation works in the album’s favor.  You have no idea what you’re getting into, and once you’re done, you’ll still probably be confused.

It helps that many of these songs are actually very good.  Whichever of the two does the singing on each of the folky tracks has a very good voice, a doomy baritone that he sometimes deploys on the heavier tracks.  Equally impressive is the variety of tracks on display: there are sample-heavy sound collages (“The Gods and the Apes”), Panopticon-style black metal (“Rise!”), and smatterings of feedback (“Ascending Fire”), and the funny thing is, they all sound like products of the same two strange minds.

No one else could have made this, and it’s doubtful that Albatwitch could even duplicate it.  But that’s okay, because they have this document, this weird, backwoods-occultist piece of music, that for all its strange qualities, every thing about it that makes me want to listen to something a little more conventional is overtaken by ten other details that are just plain entertaining, and, if you can believe it, fun.  Sure, it’s bizarro, but that’s all part of the charm of All Dead Birds Sing.  All you forward-thinking metalheads: check it out.