Lotus Thrones – Petrichor (Digital Only Release)
Lotus Thrones – Petrichor (Digital Only Release)
Self – Released
Release Date: 04/04/25
Running Time: 41:18
Review by Dark Juan
Score: 666,666,666,666/10
Hello, my beautiful young things. It is I, Dark Juan, goth elder and psychopomp to toffs and gentry. Today is not a momentous day, because yesterday evening I learned that Mrs Dark Juan and I have been turned down to adopt the dog that I fell in love with at Cuppapug café in Manchester. I solved my incredible heartache at this news by locating some 10% Faxe beer and getting plastered last night instead. Today we are a little sore in the head and bad tempered, although I did go out for breakfast which has mitigated the hangover slightly. This means it is probably not the right time to review some music, but I am fucking well going to because Dark Juan is not defeated so easily!
Although I do wish the twat reversing his lorry up the road behind me would fuck right off because if he doesn’t I’m going to rip the buzzer of his wagon off and jam it so far up his arse he will honk every time he belches.
In the years I have been writing for Ever-Metal.com and other publications, I have been privileged to form relationships with bands and musicians (granted, I haven’t yet reached the heady heights of being PAID for it, which has kind of buggered my plans for later life and forced me to earn promotions at my actual work instead), to the point where I am trusted by them enough for them to send me their new and unreleased music personally, for which I thank each and every one of them. This is the case with today’s offering to placate the increasingly irate Platter of Splatter ™, being as it is the latest album from Philadelphia-based Post-Punk Industrialists Lotus Thrones, entitled “Petrichor”.
If you are a regular peruser of my pusillanimous posturings, you will not doubt recall that I have reviewed the work of Lotus Thrones before, and you can find those fine and erudite words at this link, should you need to refresh your memories:
https://www.ever-metal.com/2023/03/31/lotus-thrones-the-heretic-souvenir/.
I also, because we had a bit of an issue with someone at EM Towers using AI to write, now guarantee to you, good people of the world, that every word you are reading is my own. I shall prove this by stating for the record that I have a bit of a thing for Annunziata Rees-Mogg, and I would be delighted to show her how the other side play, being as I am poor as a church mouse and an atheist and she… isn’t. One in the eye for the Haunted Victorian Pencil as well, which is frankly just an added benefit…
Opening cut ‘Дождь’ is a haunting, chopped up piece of music that has mournful strings and electronics set over coarse and insistent military radio reports, and sounds that could have been made by UVB-76 and other numbers stations – all Cold War paranoia and that curious sense of peace you have when you know that something calamitous is going to happen and there’s absolutely fuck all you can do about it, and the inevitability of it weighs surprisingly lightly on your soul. This gives way to ‘The Demon Acrobats’, which sounds like what might be the outcome of a sweaty sexual liaison between Deathstars, early Pitch Shifter and The Jesus and Mary Chain. This is underpinned by the usual baritone of Heath Rave (who is responsible for everything on this album, the annoyingly talented bastard) and some unusual and interesting choices of instrumentation and arrangement. Lotus Thrones are not an easy listening band. They are challenging and this is what makes them so absolutely fascinating to Dark Juan. You truly have no idea where the musical nightmares that Heath Rave suffers from are going to take you next. After the Metalised Post-Punk of ‘The Demon Acrobats’, we have ‘Yellow Fingers’, which is a brutal and savage Industrial cut that is driven by jackhammering drums and grinding, shrieking noise and discordance and a thirst for blood quite unlike anything I have ever heard. Think Throbbing Gristle having discovered My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult and you are getting in the general area of what this song sounds like. Normally, the music of Lotus Thrones is closely controlled, merely hinting at the chaos bubbling beneath the surface. This song is the chaos and the shrieking lunacy having boiled over. A screaming paean to madness, an anthem of insanity…
‘Empiriocritical Proletarian Community of Tonight!’ changes the aesthetic again, having that cold and inhuman power that Industrial music employs so adroitly – the alienation of Joy Division and the arrangements and sheer overwhelming rage of Godflesh slam together in this song and make it one long torture session, as it drones, crashes and grinds the listener into fertiliser. There is no quarter given or even thought about – Lotus Thrones just want your soul, and they are going to tear it out with their fucking TEETH if they have to.
How do I sum up this record? “Petrichor” is an exploration of the darker sides of humanity, probing its soft, seedy underbelly and being both revolted and intrigued by what Lotus Thrones have found there – it stinks and it is bleak and black and lonely and cold and horrifying, but you just can’t stop looking, searching for meaning in the terror and the piles of guts and garbage while your already fragile sense of self fragments even further until you are just shards, slivers of something that was once human but now is reduced entirely to raw sensation, exposed nerve endings viciously stimulated and making pain and suffering into something transcendent. It is brutalism without the minimalism that comes with it. There’s nothing human here anymore, only endless grey concrete with suspicious stains that look worryingly like old bloodstains and marks that look like the craters left by soft-core dum dum bullets, sharp edges and a wind that chills you to the bone…
Yes, this is another seminal work from Lotus Thrones, yet another steadfast refusal to fit into any particular musical demographic. They are unique and special and beyond comparison. I can only offer this list of bands to get you to understand even slightly where they come from – Lotus Thrones are a melding of Swans, early Pitch Shifter, Ministry and the harder edged old British Goth like Fields of The Nephilim and the Jesus and Mary Chain. But then there’s the cold misanthropy of Godflesh too. Jesus, I love this band and their deconstruction and rebuilding of Industrial and Post-Punk in their own twisted, mentally fucked image.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System is again broken by Lotus Thrones and prostrates itself before them, offering a score of 666,666,666,666/10 because they are just that good. If you like fragmented, twisted, broken music that feeds off itself, anyway. Purists will hate them, but I fucking love them.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Дождь (Rain)
02. The Demon Acrobats
03. Yellow Fingers
04. Empiriocritical Proletarian Community of Tonight!
05. Ocular
06. Stockholm
07. Nadezhda
08. Резидентура (Residency)
09. Exfiltration
LINE-UP:
Heath Rave – Everything and I am not fucking worthy.
LINKS:
