"Operating under the name Birchville Cat Motel for more than a decade, New Zealand's Campbell Kneale has mapped a formidable, boundless body of drone. Across the course of his innumerable available (and hopelessly unavailable) recordings, Kneale has crafted his various free-form creations with an uncommon patience and a painterly eye for detail, resulting in a catalog that veers dramatically from austere electronic flutter to ferocious scorched-earth noise.
Kneale's work has become increasingly guided by the pull of black/doom metal in recent years, as best exemplified by his sludgy productions as Black Boned Angel. This inclination is in glorious display on Our Love Will Destroy the World, a new Birchville full-length that inseparably marries Kneale's mile-deep electric drones and jacked-up Neu!/Hawkwind propulsion to create a gnarled, ridiculously savage heavy-psych juggernaut.
On many of Birchville's past albums, such as last year's exquisite With Maples Ablaze, Kneale has been joined by collaborators like Reynols, Dead C's Bruce Russell, and Lee Ranaldo. It's unclear, however, whether Kneale had any guests contribute to the multi-tracked ensemble din of Our Love. Despite its full-band assault the album advances with such a concentrated, beam-like focus that it sounds as though it might have been transmitted onto tape directly via one man's seething brainwaves.
Two of the five tracks here originally appeared on 2003's out-of-print Screamformelongbeach CD-R. Among the others is the centerpiece, the seismic, 16-minute riff-mantra "55,000 Flowers For the Hero", an Acid Mothers Temple-style piledriver whose emotive impact is somewhat akin to being overtaken by a swift-flowing river of molten asphalt. Incredibly dense with massed overtones of guitar and electronics, this track appears at once monolithic yet dazzlingly intricate in its drifting shadows, shedding excess layers as it very gradually melts away to a lone specter of amp distortion. Likewise, "Heaven's Flaming Horse" combines sawblade drones and turbulent grindcore rhythms to forge an insoluble, corrosive mass of charred flesh and spent wiring, reducing metal's flash and bombast down to an endlessly intense, solitary roar.
Following this barrage the melodic "Lay Thy Hatred Down" appears as an oasis of tranquility, the counterpoint of Kneale's sedate guitar and woodwind figures providing the listener a brief respite from the album's high-octane oblivion. The mysterious organ and doctored-tape drone of "Double Cascade Mini Fantasy" adds a welcome touch of gothic confusion; the set-closing title track is another tortured, color-saturated Sabbath riff, bombarded from all angles with random debris and piercing electronic wails. Less authoritative and hypnotic than the earlier "55,000 Flowers", this redundant finale comes as a slight letdown, though it is somewhat redeemed by its prolonged outro of vibrant, stray particles that careen about as if in desperate search for another unfathomable riff to ride. And judging by Kneale's overall productivity and obvious passion for Birchville's new, heavier direction, the guess here is the wait for that riff will not be long." PITCHFORK
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