Ungraven – Hollows Made Homes In Their Sunken Cheeks
Ungraven – Hollows Made Homes In Their Sunken Cheeks
Heavy Psych Sounds
Release Date: 18/04/25
Running Time: 43:22
Review by Dark Juan
392,775,038,063,820/10
Hello, dear hearts. Dark Juan here, and it has been a fairly challenging couple of days, so I am taking this time from my increasingly mental schedule to write words and chat with you all before the next crisis befalls me, although I am increasingly amused at the internet and the denizens within and their posturing depending on whether you are pro or anti-Russian at the moment. One side peddles lies and the other increasingly outlandish memes and claims like Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin fell down the stairs and shit himself. I shall let you work out which side is which. Dark Juan has political views that I don’t normally share on the internet because it normally turns into a massively violent rant beyond the fact that I am actively anti-fascist. No-one listens anyway and I am not going to make any difference to geopolitics by calling ILoveTrump_24354211 (although there are many Liberian flag emojis I have corrected. That’s autism for you. I can’t leave that unchallenged) a fucking small-dicked prick who couldn’t satisfy a hummingbird. Instead, I fold it within myself and allow the hatred of humanity to grow a little bit more in the furnace of my heart, as it burns with ever increasing fury and disapprobation towards my supposedly fellow humans. One day I will snap…
This is why I don’t go out much.
It is time to once more unleash the Platter of Splatter ™ and distract myself from the horrors without. Upon it has been placed an offering by Ungraven. Ungraven are composed of one current and one past member of Scouse Stoners Conan and “Hollows Made Homes in Their Sunken Cheeks” represents a bit of a difference to their other projects.
Well, that’s an understatement.
This record is nothing like Conan. Instead, this is Experimental Drone instead of Stoner Metal. Now, I am aware that Drone is very much a genre that is an acquired taste, but Dark Juan has always been a sucker for music that is slow and grinding, painful and shifting. Ungraven do this with uncommon power, a slowly drawn-out apocalypse of sound that ebbs and flows, burns and chills and builds and destroys itself before remaking itself in its own twisted image.
The album opens with ‘Nothing is Less Than Zero’, and this song lasts a mere 20 minutes. It… it… it exists. It exists in a continuum unlike anything experienced by humanity before. It is crushing gravities pressing flesh encased in powered armour into the surface of a blasted world. The filters and cookers on the suit getting rid of the toxins from the ravaged air are overworked to almost-failure and it vents radioactive dust and microscopic, mutant viruses from dirt-clogged vents, the motors and power source running almost red hot, the head-up display flashing up warning after warning of imminent failure as articulated joints and motors force yet another step out of the suit, fighting against the ever-present gravity just ready to press the vulnerable flesh within it into a boneless, crushed thing that once resembled a human being. There’s no life here, the relentless weight and nuclear fallout has rendered this world lifeless apart from mutated bacteria and viruses that have evolved to eat radiation and can remain dormant for centuries if need be. There is no solace here, there is only suffering. The music reflects this, the darkness and corresponding drop in temperature fatal to humans – it is depressing, slow moving and utterly unstoppable. ‘Nothing is Less Than Zero’ is mind blowing as it slowly, ever so slowly builds layer upon layer of sound into an overwhelming wave that encompasses endlessly looped, distorted guitars, vocoder, synths, keyboards and organ. It is the most dystopian future you could imagine, with massively armed warships locked in geostationary orbits over assigned strategic targets, so vast that they can be seen from the surface. It is the knowledge that there is an arsenal the likes of which you have never ever even contemplated the existence of, and it is all pointed directly at where you are standing. Ungraven is the sound of your spine quailing, your entire existence of the point of being snuffed out like the unimportant collection of atoms you are, your long-drawn out waiting for oblivion. It is fatalism and abandonment in musical form.
Which means, of course, that Dark Juan finds it fucking brilliant because there is absolutely no thought given by the band about being accessible or commercial. They exist to give total obliteration and the incipient heart death of the universe a soundtrack.
‘Hollows Made Home’ lasts even longer, clocking in at 22 minutes plus and gives us more of the same, societal collapse on a planetary scale, an endless, slowly advancing tactical nuclear walking barrage, behind which are endless ranks of advancing, armoured infantry and massive, heavily armed tracked battle tanks belching fire from hugely oversized cannons. The earth is shaking from detonations and from the tramp of rank after infinite rank of marching infantry advancing under the cover of shrieking jet bombers unloading megatons of death from well beyond the range of the crump of anti-aircraft artillery and counter-battery fire. There is a frisson in the air, of sparking static, the babble of commands and orders over hardened radio communications, the fizzing and sparking and tang of ozone underneath the stench of fallout and high explosive as electronic targeting systems glitch and freeze, and electronic attack aircraft burn out radar and communications channels with roaring electronic squeals and shrieks. Guns roar and there is the buzzing of projectiles over the heads of dug in defenders and fountains of earth and body parts where shells explode. There is no hiding from this warfare. It is ubiquitous and it is everywhere around you. A front hundreds of miles long being breached by overwhelming force against which only token and utterly futile resistance is possible. Fortresses with walls hundreds of feet thick are atomised by orbital bombardments from space battlecruisers the size of cities, bristling with weapons and kinetic penetrators that don’t explode. They use their velocity, burying themselves hundreds of feet underground and the shockwave of their impacts causing localised earthquakes and destruction for tens of miles in all directions. Nothing survives for very long anymore…
Well, having read the way that Ungraven have stimulated my imagination – you wouldn’t think that one of the more prevalent influences on the “music” of Ungraven is Tangerine fucking Dream would you? Ungraven share the same absolute desire to be uncategorisable as do the German Electronic Music pioneers, especially their more ambient phases, and Dark Juan can hear their cosmic influence throughout the sonic Armageddon of Ungraven. Other influences I picked up on were Zombi (sequenced looping waves of sound) and Harold Budd (a musical pioneer of Minimal Music and a man for whom infinite sustain was life) and these three acts all must share the blame for what Dark Juan has just experienced…
…For this was not a mere record to listen to. This album is an all-encompassing EXPERIENCE. The slow grinding of destabilised tectonic plates, the cosmically slow movements of continents, the barely noticeable building of an unstoppable tsunami hundreds of miles away from where it will devastate. Ungraven are the sound of these.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System has been pummelled into complete and absolute submission by Ungraven and has no hesitation at all in offering 392,775,038,063,820/10 for an album that I enjoyed very much, even though it has left me plastered, sweaty and hyperventilating, against my seat. Heavier and slower than time passing at a Nietzschean philosophy convention, although this is an album that, from a commercial point of view, is not going to find a very large audience, yet it is sublime genius.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Nothing is Less Than Zero
02. Hollows Made Home
LINE-UP:
Jon Davis
David Perry
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
