Earn - Hell On Earth

Bathetic vinyl and Matthew Sullivan's Earn project, so pretty much automatic purchase. I find Hell On Earth a pretty strange title for this one. Not that I always understand the intent of all this, more often than not, I think I don't, but here, these sounds aren't hellish, in fact quite the opposite. Not menacing, to me, not tortured, but just a complete reaffirmation of why we all spend time opening our ears to this type of noise. Destructed, massively damaged walls of emotion. On the surface, any descriptors I'd choose wouldn't do much to set this apart from the field of ambient recordings, but there's something here that's alive with feeling. Four tracks of stunning melody, garbled to the brink of disrepair and presented, open and raw for interpretation through your own set of filters. Each movement a bold, confident display of repetition. Which is another way of saying, Sullivan seems to know the power of the sounds he's created and doesn't succumb to the temptation to cluter them unnecessarily. Maybe someone has found the hellish feeling inside this, but in my ears, this is perfection.

Edition of 300, crisp white on white, digital download included. I grabbed direct from Bathetic.