Mellow Grave - Smoke Filled the Room, We Slept (2011) [Living Tapes] // Grade: A

Bored with witch house? Never liked it in the first place? Please meet Mellow Grave. Aucklanders Adrian Bird and Jordan Puryer spawned from the witch house universe but work well beyond its borders, conjuring hell noises both metallic and fluid, beautiful and gory — and based enough in classical composition and multi-textured atmospheres to make any naysayer think again.

We’ve talked about it before on Sounds From the Other Side, but the message bears repeating: Debut full-length Smoke Filled The Room, We Slept is an album you can’t miss. In terms of necessity, sure — definitely don’t sleep on this one (um, no pun intended) — but also sheer size. Smoke is a large record, seething and unmissable, twisting itself perfectly around the edges of hip-hop, shoegaze and industrial. Tracks like “Raining Meth” and “Merk That” come at you hard, knives in hard, like foggy techno soundtracks to some dangerous dystopia, while “Oxygen” and “Don’t Deliver Us” lurch along slowly, through the dewy mist of a morning after. And then there’s a jam like “Amphibian”, the perfect mid-point between the two: Frosty synths stutter over a steady club beat, as much glistening neon as dreadful, enveloping grey. Think of it like a modern The Fragile, albeit a gazillion times shorter; Smoke wavers back and forth between watery and aggressive, imprecise and exactly right, forcing itself through a purgatory more unsettling than hell itself.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Mellow Grave are among the most promising new bands to phoenix up from the witch house landscape. Keep one eye keen to everything they do.

- Rue Sauvage