Fell Voices - Fell Voices
Human Resources
Black Metal
2 songs (40:01)
Release year: 2009
Fell Voices, Human Resources
Reviewed by Charles
Archive review
This album from 2009 is an obscure gem of American black metal that I’ve wanted to bring to the attention of the site for a while. It represents a distillation of modern USBM’s best features: it is unflinching in its embrace of cathartic, noisy rancour, and it works its vitriolic minimalism into something powerfully meditative. This band’s split with fellow Californians Ash Borer is perhaps my favourite black metal record of 2010, but before we can get around to looking at that one it is a good idea to revisit Fell Voices’s only full-length formal release to date.

As befits something so obscurantist, there are no tracks here, just two sides of vinyl each presenting about 20 minutes of continuous music. In their lengthy, slow-burning approach to song-writing you could maybe trace their lineage back to Weakling, and in the evident nature-worship of the band name and artwork you could perhaps see them as cousins of the campfire black metal of Skagos and Agalloch. But Fell Voices has an esoteric savagery which sets it well apart from any such comparisons. Side One opens with a lengthy exhalation of screeching drone feedback, and even after it has morphed suddenly and fluidly into a roaring blaze of blasting percussion and a piercing, hypnotic wail of a riff it still retains the feel of a drone piece. The guitar lines have a whirring austerity that rarely pauses but instead sees harmonic or rhythmic patterns perpetually shifting, often gradually and subtly under the surface of a fiery and ill-produced wall of sound. At times its trance-like white noise seems like a museum-piece sound installation, with melodic and harmonic ideas lurking in the background waiting for you to strain through the haze to discern them.

This is not to say there isn’t some dynamic range. It is not uncommon for the band to stumble exhausted into washed out, scuzzed-up interludes of watery clean guitar or hissing fuzz. The second side is perhaps a little more involved and wide ranging, seeing the deviate further from their minimalist central axis. Five minutes in it assumes a wrathfully unstable character thanks to the clattering drum rolls that start to beat up at the metallic guitar drone from below. And half way through, sickening ripples of Xasthurian funeral doom submerge the listener.

This is a challenging album which rewards effort. It has an uncompromisingly feral austerity to it which encapsulates that intangible sense of misanthropy that we all look for in black metal. Essential listening for USBM fans.

Killing Songs :
N/A
Charles quoted 90 / 100
Other albums by Fell Voices that we have reviewed:
Fell Voices - Regnum Saturni reviewed by Charles and quoted 85 / 100
Fell Voices - Untitled reviewed by Brian and quoted 91 / 100
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