Lay Bare Recordings – 9th May 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
One may be inclined to jest that a release like this should carry a warning – but the joke falls flat when technically, it does: the notes which accompany the release on Bandcamp sets the scene for the debut EP from Dutch experimentalists of A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers thus:
Whilst most drone-metal outfits focus on creating atmosphere by composing ambient compositions with tremendous power and volume, the Lighthouse Keepers use more traditional doom/sludge metal as a starting point and explore its differences and similarities with genres such as free jazz, raga, noise and classical minimalism.
Elsewhere, they’re described as sounding like ‘a disturbed lovechild of OM, Sumac, Swans, Miles Davis, and Pandit Pran Nath, combining lengthy improvisations with ear-shattering explosions of intensity’. How could a lovechild of that lot be anything but disturbed?
And so it is that we enter by way of ‘The Massacre of Flour’, a title of which conjures images of a bloodbath in a bakery. What is sounds like is…. nothing short of wild. Its seven minutes leads the listener through a series of conjoined segments, arriving in a crazed blast of shrieking noise, a frenzied cacophony of feedback and squealing sax before lunging into a thick, sludge riff, which in turn yields to a slow, almost ambient drone passage with mystical swirls which rise like desert mirages. Each is gripping itself, and the transition to the next takes place almost imperceptibly: one moment you’re here, then, somehow, you’re there, in a completely different scene with no recollection of how you came to be here – rather like the way scenes change in dreams. And suddenly, the hazy serenity is torn asunder, lurching into a tectonic rift from which burst larval torture resembling Swans circa the Young God EP. It’s absolutely fucking brutal, the sound of pain, distilled and amplified
‘I Fuck People’, the shortest song on the EP, goes in hard on the avant-jazz noise chaos, forming a heavy undulation of bleats and shrieks by way of a backdrop to savage, ravaged, demonic vocals. It’s the sound of purgatorial torment. But all of this is simply a prelude to the main event, the nine-minute ‘Towers of Silence’, on which they really flex all of their muscles. Easing in gently with some abstract desert folk with hints of Eastern esotericism, it’s a slow, gradual build. There’s something meditative, spiritual in the vocals, until things begin to get twisted, mangled, and tangled. There’s anguish, there’s tension, and unease grows… breathe. But ululations which begin soothingly grow tense, and things spiral to a hypnotic cathedral of sound.
Towers of Silence may only contain three tracks with a combined duration of just over twenty minutes, but its range and intensity are something to behold. It’s drone metal, but not as we know it.
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Aural Aggravation 