LimeWire Music Blog

One would expect the end of the world to be a fairly chaotic affair.  If the the trailer for this month’s action flick 2012 is any indication, there’s going to be a lot of shit blowing up.  Cities will tumble.  Mobs will scream and trample.  There also be fighter jets, another creative destruction of the White House from disaster/snuff director Roland Emmerich, and (if you don’t blink) Oliver Platt.  I’m judging from the trailer alone, because it convinced me to totally disregard the actual film based on the erroneous statement that the Mayans were the “oldest civilization.”  If you’re gonna buy into this 2012 stuff – the year the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar calls for the end of a great cycle of 13 b’a'ktuns and the birth of a new creation world from our boring old one – do a little reading on the culture you’re mining.  At the very least Boston doom/psyche quarter Ichabod do their fricking homework.

Their version of 2012 is nowhere near as chaotic as all that, despite a leaning toward metal and turn of the century American hardcore.  If this is an apocalypse, its a pretty disciplined one.  Sabbath-inspired riffs and tight rhythms keep what could be an ethereal psychonaut anchored to this crashing material plane.  Sure, terra firma might be going down, but that doesn’t mean Ichabod wants to stop rocking.  Even the addition of flute – an instrument that when used correctly represents the singing of angels but has proved for innumerable tasteless prog acts as disasterous as any tidal wave – Ichabod manages to keep their momentum. And all this while balancing that difficult tight-rope between heavy and dreamy, psychedelic and crushing.

Of course, the tight discipline and conservative elements of 2012 work against it as well.  Their hardcore inspired rockers end up less interesting than their astral explorations, and songs like the album’s title track end up not being by-the-books underground metal of ten years past instead of ten years ahead only by virtue of singer Ken Mackay’s dreamy stoner wail.  Of course even this least interesting of the album’s five original tracks devolves quickly (and thankfully) into the bizarre, beginning with a shrieking wah-heavy solo by guitarist Dave Iverson.  By the time the choir has kicked in, you’re safely in back in the mode for sound experiments.  Good thing since the last track of the album “2012 Outro” is a droney collection of samples and noises a full ten seconds longer than “2012″ itself.

2012 might not be the most captivating albums on the experimental and heavy psyche radar in 2009, but its a pretty competent one.  Twisted…but not too twisted.  And long-time fans of the mode will find their reason for getting a hold of Ichabod’s fourth album in the band’s totally bad-ass cover of Pink Floyd’s “Nile Song.”  The track, originally from More, is one of early Floyd’s most metal offerings, and has been re-imagined more than a couple of times as a heavy banger.  This time, Ichabod turns the original three-minute song into a ten-minute epic, taking Floyd’s heaviest and to the point and subverting it back into experimental psyche.  Awesome.