Search - Skullflower :: Transformer

Well, it could be worse, really...

Robert P. Beveridge | Cleveland, OH | 12/05/2000

(2 out of 5 stars)

"This is Skullflower? This is the band who stunned the world with Form Destroyer and then came to America and made it look so effortless by releasing Obsidian Shaking Codex? I don't believe it, and I won't until Bower and Dennison tell me themselves. Still, while it's not in the same glorious vein as the chunky proto-doom-metal of Form Destroyer, or the delicate ambience that made "Smoke Jaguar" [from Obsidian Shaking Codex] one of the finest recordings of our generation, there's some stuff here to be at least partially excited about. "Morning Dew" serves as a reminder that even Black Sabbath recorded "Laguna Sunrise." While "Morning Dew" is longer (pretty close to ten minutes), I get that same feel from it, a kind of carefree lightening of the load in the midst of general chaos. "The Lords of Increase" is good, solid stoner-psychedelia-metal. It's not as groundbreaking as the stuff from the Form Destroyer days, but it's not boring, either. Ultimately, that seems to be the direction the whole album took: not groundbreaking, but not boring. It doesn't succeed all the time, but it does more often than not. Definitely one for the Skullflower completists in the crowd, but newbies should definitely try to hunt down Obsidian Shaking Codex (RRR, 1991) or the Ruins compilation (Head Dirt, 1990), which contains most of the classic Form Destroyer."