Cruel Nature Records – 22nd September 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
Love a few drones, me. Aural ones, not the buzzy buggers that tossers fly about for fun, or the nasty ones that undertake military operations and shoot the shit out of people and places. But places… places are important, the way they are so closely connected to memory, the way they evoke recollections of experiences… memory fades over time, but placers can so often provide triggers. The blurb for A Votive Offering register a deeper meaningfulness on account of the way the significance of place bears weight. I find myself; yearning for places I half-remember from childhood. My memory is a databank of random shots, from standing stone circles in Scotland and in the south, to a metal sign with a bullet hole in it, somewhere isolated on Dartmoor.
And so we arrive as A Votive Offering, and I shall quote in full from the Cruel Nature site here:
4 years since 2021’s Tethered Tales, the latest album by Deadman’s Ghost for Cruel Nature, uses drones, dark folk sounds, old samples and electronic beats to coalesce around a central theme. Each track in this collection evokes an obscure place in the Irish countryside with connections to folklore. Tucked away amidst today’s regimented rural landscape, small pockets of wilderness survive; vestiges of another era hidden behind roadside hedges and across farmer’s fields. These include the ruined cottage of a clairvoyant healer; a pair of standing stones believed to be oracles; a well which cures madness; and a cave where offerings were once left for ancient spirits. The songs presented here are paeans to these liminal spaces, and are infused with recordings taken there.
The first of the album’s seven compositions, ‘Chtonic Currents’ combines hovering hums, sonorous drones, gongs, bells, chimes, and special abstraction which occasionally builds to immense levels. ‘The Speaking Stones’ is ominous, heavy, and brings ominous waves of noise which wash over resonant, droning vocals.
There are samples on ‘The Man Who Felled the Fairythorn’, and one can’t help but contemplate the sad situation of Sycamore Gap. Or perhaps that is just me. The surprise here is that things suddenly take a turn for the heavy with throbbing industrial grooves cutting in.
A Votive Offering is dark. While twitters and chimes abound, dark surging, sonorous drones dominate, and weigh heavy over the sci-fi intimations tracks like ‘Biddy Early’s Potion’, where hints of Westworld twang, and hang ominously.
Gulls craw and waves splash on ‘Lunnaigh Dunes’, and a certain sadness pervades, inexplicably, dragging at the guts and lying heavy. Life was simpler once, and no so long ago. Nostalgia now is not what it was. And suddenly a drone grinds dark. The dynamic of A Votive Offering is one of continued motion, which keeps it interesting, but it’s also haunting.
A Votive Offering as a whole is haunting, but also strange, abstract, otherworldly. Ultimately, it’s… different, and an album get lost in.
AA
Aural Aggravation 