Fiadh it Friday: Ooty Booty Dooties
This one’s for you, Hans!
Enoywn – Spellwork of the Insane
February 28, 2025 | Transparent-Red Shell Cassette
At the end of 2024, Fiadh released Summer of the Late Rose, the debut album from Kansas’ Enowyn inspired by Brian Jacques’ beloved Redwall series. That delicate little album turned quite eerie and unnerving after a more whimsical beginning. As perhaps the ominous red tape shell and album title signal, Enowyn’s sophomore release is appropriately somber and moody. These are “the cries of a sorceress who strives against the dying stars, and the sounds of spellwork that shatters the mind.” The sun is shining so brightly through my window, but they are foreboding rays, as we know what awaits us.
Llefelys – The Crystal Cave
January 17, 2025 | Clear Shell Cassette
Less autumnal than previous releases, The Crystal Cave is adventurous, daring, and enriched by fantasy. The keyboard work on The Crystal Cave is curious and evocative, and it often belies its complexity. Many of the tracks here appear simple, shorn of more intricate playing. Yet each begins to bloom, as more notes and chords and tones swirl up from the song’s primary motif. There’s something almost exotic to the proceedings, though perhaps that should be expected when writing an album about daring to enter the crystal dragon’s lair. “Hate Crystal,” in particular, seems to arrive from a very distant world.
Worrystone – Three Ravens Waiting
January 10, 2025 | Purple Shell Cassette
A “kobold” is a mischievous spirit that likes to haunt houses, mines, and other underground places. It seems this spirit has conjured forth “the bleak atmosphere of awakening from a DOS game nightmare” we find in Three Ravens Waiting. Dark, gloomy, creepy, odd, strange, shadowy… these are feelings that lurk around every obscured corner for our brave, foolhardy traveler. “View from the Summit,” a personal favourite, summons a swirling, haunting mood, one that feels nigh inescapable. Have we escaped? Closer “Warlockscraper” suggests our travels and travails are endless. Fear not, for they are also exciting, the very stuff of life.
Greenwood – Welcome Home
January 3, 2025 | No tape!
Ontario’s Hearthen Ring is again collaborating with Fiadh for a subscriber-only release that will soothe your Castorian soul. That’s right. It’s beaver synth! “A pair of excited beavers welcome home their first kit to their lodge.” You, a beaver, have, with your beaver partner, brought home to your beaver lodge a new kit, expanding your beaver family and making this beaver world that much more beautiful. Sure, there will be sleepless beaver nights, and your beaver mornings and beaver middays will surely change, but this new beaver love will lead to a whole new beaver life you never thought possible.
Elven Sorrow – The Sorrow of Elves
December 27, 2024 | Silver-Swirl Shell Cassette
J-cards on the table: I know little of the elven world and their sorrows. I see a headless crown, a noose, a worried and melancholy face in the reeds. This is immersive, long-form electro-darkness, with chilling vocals floating through telling morbid tales. I like to imagine that disembodied voice is reciting the final stanza of Thomas Hardy’s “Neutral Tones”: “Since then, keen lessons that love deceives, / And wrings with wrong have shaped to me / Your Face, and the God curst sun, and a tree / And a pond edged with grayish leaves.” It is all tragic, all beautiful.
And now we Flush! Don’t we, Hans?
A staggering amount of No. from Stick in this week’s TMP. Roldy highlighted an album that could have serious staying power in TTT.
We got the exclusive early album premiere from Celestial Scourge. Observers of the Inevitable is out today!
Toilet Radio 545 with Joe n Jordan with a classic episode. Stop the madness.
Professor Guanaco with a wonderful piece about Alien Weaponry.
Hans‘s track premiere got promoted by none other than JK Broadrick himself. Time to retire, Hans! For several reasons…
Sean Ghoulson with a perfectly cromulent review of the new Necrambulant that may or may not embiggen your feelings about the band.
Read the posts. Post your GBUs. Go forth and have a wonderful weekend. I beaver you all very mulch.
