www.musiquemachine.com

“Hunts & Wars” finds this British based dark ambient meets stripped and off-kilter doom project offering up their third and most consistent release to date. With layers of ritual and military percussion, along with noise elements been added to the projects sound to create a grim and sweeping sound canvas that has moments blood stained dissonance/ noise to more subtle and uneasy dwells.

The album is a really a fairly even balance between longer/building tracks and shorter more atmospheric tracks. There are in all four longer tracks that last between just over the seven minute to just shy of twenty minute mark a-piece. And these tracks utilize more of the wavering & stripped sub-bass doom riffs, the ritual and military percussive marches, and the more atmospheric noise elements- all to make epic, often building ,dramatic but very grim pieces. Then we have the shorter tracks which really break up and give you a slight atmospheric breather from the longer epic works and these are a mixture of: bleak/ subtle painted drone matter or darken organ weaves, looped doomed neo-classical dirges, and generally more subdued grimly cinematic moments.

As the albums title suggest there’s more than a whiff of battlefields & conflict running through the album sonic veins, but the wars, battles and deaths that are audibly summoned up here are not of the glamorous or Hollywood variety. No- this is all about exhausted and gaunt soldiers fighting knee deep in mud, blood and excrement. Or soldiers slowly dying all alone in a bleak drizzly soacked forest glades, where birds circle getting ready to pick their flesh when they can no longer fend them off..

Sure “Hunts & Wars” is highly bleak and hopeless listening experience, yet there is light and shade in the sonic suffering and moroseness that makes this so much more replayble and rewarding as a whole. One of 2010’s grim highlights.