Knot of Fire "Tempest Over Refuge" cd

Knot of Fire

Tempest Over Refuge

Peasant Spring Recordings

I guess I should have known better, but I really had no idea what to expect from this record. It doesn’t really look like a harsh record, by that I mean there’s no fetuses, skulls, or autopsy photos of any sort on the cover. Not trusting it at all, I apprehensively put this disc in the tray, sure that it was going to be 10 tracks of dog fucking or something. 

     Turns out this is pretty standard heavy noise waves, rhythmically battering your skull. Sometimes there’s a dude yelling at you with a cb radio, and there’s even a sample. Normally this isn’t a great thing for me, but it’s really long, and repeats, making it sort of rad. I need to stress, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with these songs, I just wasn’t really stoked about it.

     Then I got to track 7. The cover tells me it’s a diddie called “Threshold’s Edge”. That’s kind of a rad name, but it’s bullshit. This song should have been called “Aluminum Whale Reunion” or something. It’s straight fucking haunting. It’s blown out, far away, beautiful, and completely unexpected. This theme of gross prettiness continues throughout the rest of the album. Of course, fuck me for forming an opinion, because the very next song will have you convinced you’re stuck in an assembly line somewhere deep in Oceania. I normally wouldn’t spend so much effort talking about individual tracks, but the 2nd half of this record took me completely by surprise. The final song is I’m pretty sure what dying at sunset sounds like, and there’s even one that sounds a lot like a really angry Fuck Buttons, like bittersweet triumph trying to crawl through a barbwire fence.

     This thing looks like a post-something cd that at 16 I would have been all over. I actually had to hit up the internet just to make sure I wasn’t looking at a Boysetsfire bootleg. As I mentioned, there’s nothing indicative of the contents from the art, which I guess is my bad. All in all, given the huge broner I’ve got for the 2nd half of this album, I would definitely recommend picking it up. (RS)