The Metallic Year

Sometimes, music is scary. Not scary in the way that Master of Puppets might frighten the elderly couple down the street or in the way It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back tries to strike fear in the heart of the American establishment, but, like, legitimately sort of spooky. Thrill Jockey band Imbogodom makes that kind of eerie music, all vaguely haunted sounds and underlying dread. A duo comprised of the UK’s Alexander Tucker and New Zealand’s Daniel Beban, Imbogodom recently produced its debut LP, The Metallic Year, and it’s an album that creates a certain mood, for sure.

Imbogodom make creep-out music, the kind they play when the guy with the knife's just out of frame, when the phone call is coming from inside the house. The fun to pronounce doom-drone duo of UK guitarist/tape manipulator Alexander Tucker and New Zealandic cohort Daniel Beban deal in the kind of creaky spookhouse disquiet that whistles and thumps like a dark cabin on a stormy night; bilgey, sylvan drones overlaid with the occasional maniac-behind-the-door moan. The Metallic Year does get mighty eerie, but it only ever verges on startling.

It might seem odd to call an album as austere and unsettling as this one a nostalgia project, but The Metallic Year was partly born of a hankering to revive the obsolete art of tape-loop editing. Imbogodom began when Kiwi radio engineer Daniel Beban discovered the old reel-to-reel machines at the BBC's Bush House. He then spent his night shifts with Brit Alexander Tucker conjuring sonic ghosts from the machines, inspired by 1960s experimenters such as Terry Riley and Steve Reich, as well as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The result of these sessions is an album that should certainly not be played in daylight. Not only was it made in the wee small hours; its lunar, lunatic atmospheres are the soundtrack to a bad dream.