NATIONAL SUNDAY LAW

National Sunday Law - Festival of the Horned God

This EP is not good as their full lenght debut La Storia Di Cannibali (and they still have nothing to do with RPI), and not as good as their previous EP The Fifth Ape, but it does a great job and show us an evil face of National Sunday Law songwriting.

The Festival of The Horned God has three tracks, and a total running time of 27 minutes.This record is much more sludge/doom oriented. Fully loaded, heavy, with massive slow-grinding riffs. The melodic post rock chords are there, to put some intense atmospherical feeling. Antoillier, the second track, start as a dark folk ambient music. The song turns into an adventurous evil metal , followed by the eleven minutes piece, Preservation in Stone, another dissonant hymn featuring ritualistic untuned screams, where the riffs brought me I Am I (Nightbringer) in mind. The shoegaze riffs are almost forgotten until the last few minutes of the album, where can be found some Cynic-like vocals in the background for the lead screams. This time, the psychedelic influences were used to create a monstruous vibe.

A fine short experience.

National Sunday Law - La Storia Di Cannibali

A mostly unknown album from 2009

National Sunday Law is a band hided under the "new wave of psychedelia's" carpet. This new wave is full of "occult rock" groups trying to sound very 70s. Even in the vintage area, there's a huge influence from the modern sludge, and tips extracted from post rock tripping moves. La Storia Di Cannibali show us a band which apparently care for their influential tags such these, but it doesn't affects their musical personality. The sound is distinctive, featuring dischordant uses of hybrid tunes and chaotic dissonance. Everything interpreted in a stoner way. The vocals are kinda harsh, with classic shoegaze guitar effects. Tracks like "Secons Left" is a great example. Bending from atmospherical heavy metal to melodic underwater ambience's texture, this duo don't waste a powerful scream in the right time.

The band is formed by Derek Donley and Darin Tambascio, although the album includes vocal from Sacha Dunable on the theme track The Story of Cannibals. At the first minutes of the album I didn't realize nothing really special about it. But the second half of the first track, We Dragged Our Tusks For Miles And Miles Before The Plains Devoured Them (eleven minutes and a giant title), I slowly came enjoying the album. There's a traumatic synth & moog ready to penetrate down your ears. For example, the electronic note pressed in the track To Hell With You while the band plays a repetitive destructive riff sounds like a monophonic hipnosis, leaving me with bulging eyes. After a whole minute of this, it became an anesthetic vibration. Some ambient music passages such as the track Down The Ocean. Strong and Mighty Like an Oak is the second lenghty track, starts very groovy and dissonant, like a Voivod incarnation on aggressive/alternative sludge, and the end of the catastrophical part is a borderline black metal, I mean, you know what kind of black metal I'm talking about, this modern doom/stoner semi avant-garde stuff.

Without any shade of doubt, the tracks seven and eight are the highlights. "Anthropophagy" and "And They Fly Too Close to The Sun Like Icarus" are just the best collection of riffs the band threw out together with this album. Not so aggressive, just right on the mood. The last track is the lenghtiest: The Story of Cannibals. Sixteen minutes. If you enjoyed the album until now you will like this song, if you hate it, this track will make no difference. The cover art is awesome, seems like a goddess from my mother's early paintings stealing a hypo from Viva Boma, showing it different colors to it's world. The hypo is getting sick purple/pink and pukes his blue bile.

Heavy, noisy, and trippy. Support the undergorund! Look forward to them.