Valley of Fear - 2012 - Valley of Fear

 

Legion Blotan – BLOTCD012  216.80MB FLAC

Valley of Fear sits in that strange, useful corner where the personnel list explains almost everything and almost nothing. Justin Broadrick brings the machine weight, the scorched industrial pulse, the sense that repetition can become architecture if it is made heavy enough. Matthew Bower and Samantha Davies bring the Skullflower weather system: guitar not as riff-delivery device, but as pressure, glare, occult radiation, metal filings blown across a magnet. Together it does not feel like a “supergroup” so much as a sealed room where three long-running languages of distortion were allowed to speak at once until the walls began answering.

The record has black metal in its bloodstream, but not in the tidy costume-shop way. It is more like black metal after the song form has been burned away and only the vertical force remains: tremor, velocity, glare, ritual insistence. The rhythm machine gives the whole thing a dead-eyed forward drag, while the guitars smear and swarm above it, sometimes suggesting melody only to bury it under ash seconds later. It is harsh, but not just harsh. There is a devotional quality to it too, a sense of people staring into the same furnace from different histories.

The minimal presentation helps. A sparse CD on Legion Blotan, very little explanatory furniture, no grand statement trying to domesticate the noise. That leaves the listener with the object and the sound, which is probably the correct amount of information. In a scene where mythology can sometimes arrive before the music, Valley of Fear works because the mythology seems to have been scraped off rather than piled on. What remains is dense, unfriendly, and oddly clarifying.

This is also one of those releases that makes the archive feel less like a collection of albums and more like a map of collisions. Godflesh, Skullflower, black metal, noise rock, industrial ritual, private-label austerity, digital afterlife: all of those paths touch here without becoming one clean highway. It is a small disc, but it opens a nasty little valley between several mountains. Anyone who has lived with Broadrick’s heaviness or Bower’s guitar weather will recognize pieces of the terrain, but the combined climate is its own thing.