Natural Snow Buildings - Terror Horns LP

Label: Ba Da Bing

Our Review:

There's long been a haunted thread that traces through all of the work from Natural Snow Buildings, the French duo of Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte, whose long-form tangles of ritualist drone-rock minimalism and sprawling, opiated psychedelia harks back to International Harvester, Flying Saucer Attack and Kemialliset Ystavat. Here on Terror's Horns, Natural Snow Buildings plumb the depths of an emotional gloom and shuddering despair with this epic, cinematic album. The two have long-specialized in expansive tracks of shimmering guitars, woodwinds and bowed instruments that could be psalters, zithers and/or violins, all of which blossom into sublime masses of droning impressionism. On Terror's Horns, Natural Snow Building engage in a sound far more elegiac and funereal and heavier than heard on any of their previous recordings. The freak-folk transcendence of NSB still will embrace the unsettling falsetto of Ameziane and the percussive clatter of Gularte, with the swirling psychedelia tumbling downward in lush cinematic collapse, with heavy minor-key chords and reverb saturated rhythmic plod providing plenty of parallels to the early days of Barn Owl and the latter days of Earth. Beautiful as always, these Natural Snow Buildings, if much darker than in days gone by.