review by: Roberto Martinelli

We got a bunch of CDR albums by Dead Raven Choir, a largely one-man, dark folk project, and it's pretty weird. It's so almost inexplicably strange that I hesitate to call it bad outright.

Take The Blood of Two Wolves as an example. This record is performed by two guys, one who plays guitar and one who does vocals. The vocals are all spoken in what I suspect is at least an exaggerated (if not totally put on) Eastern European accent - the guy likes to roll his Rs. The music itself is totally improvised. It seems that most of the time the vocalist is leading the guitarist, but the response time is kind of staggered. This means you'll get lots of parts where the vocalist decides he wants to get dramatic or dark or quiet or sinister, and the guitarist will get the idea a few moments later and launch into something he feels suits the mood. The attempts at dynamics seem totally random, almost as if the two guys sat down and made a checklist for each song, that each track had to feature at least one anxious part, one sulking part, one indifferent part, one reflective part, etc... and the vocalist is going down the list crossing the requisites off.

I'm confused at to what the intention of this album is considering its baffling values. You would think that The Blood of Two Wolves was intended as a pedestal to present some dark poetry, but as that, it fails. This is because the vocals are so buried in the mix that you can only make out every 10th word or so. I had to put on headphones to be able to follow what was going on. Even if the vocals were properly audible, it seems that the lyrics were written in as improvised a manner as the music, or spouted out from some dark folk lyric generator machine that has for a vocabulary 150 dark words that it arranges randomly.

The improvised music itself follows in the same pattern as the variety of the vocals. It's all random plinks and warbles with little strums here and there. Is this the result of two guys who really have no idea what they're doing and have no talent whatsoever, or is it the result of two lunatics without that much musical talent to speak of, but whose music that could be called bafflingly bad will incite morbid curiosity in some listeners? I'll leave it up to you. On to the next Dead Raven Choir review...