TenHornedBeast - My Horns Are A Flame To Draw Down The Truth

The TenHornedBeast is back. After the staggeringly impressive The Sacred Truth, Christopher Walton raises his antlers once again and returns with My Horns Are A Flame To Draw Down The Truth, a companion piece to their The Sacred Truth album offering three substantially reworked tracks along with two new tracks. The Sacred Truth, in my opinion, was an essential release of dark, doom ambient but with My Horns Are A Flame To Draw Down The Truth he burrows deeper with a bleaker and starker take on the atmospheres of his debut Cold Spring release.

'Ruin's Son' reworks 'Christus Nox' with the sound of rising and falling hushed gongs fused with indistinguishable sombre chants, and wavering drones that reverberate, arch and echo creating a dense, morass of bleakness. Only shards of guitar feedback manage to pierce the overriding blackness. The following track 'Black Walls Rising / Black Stars Falling' carries shape-shifting howling atmospherics, tinged with light shrill edginess teetering around the edges of the imposing hovering blackness. A looped stabbing heavy drone forms the basis of the title track, 'My Horns Are A Flame To Draw Down The Truth', with moments of heaving, and crashing rumbles spread amongst the ominous churning.

There's always been a nascent ritualised feel to the work of TenHornedBeast. It's never been more obvious than on 'The Sword Was Our Pope' with its funeral beat surrounded by hauntingly effected chanting and a blackened shimmering drone. 'In The Teeth of The Wolf' was a particular highpoint of The Sacred Truth and here reworked as 'Fenris Wolf' it is stripped of all traces of percussion leaving only drone chords, set against blurred coruscating electronic drones.

The above descriptions might not make My Horns Are A Flame To Draw Down The Truth sound too attractive but TenHornedBeast tap into some primal, something powerful that's difficult to ignore. Owners of The Sacred Truth will have snapped this up already, and anyone even half interested in doom sonics won't want to miss out on this or its predecessor, The Sacred Truth. For more information go to www.coldspring.co.uk