Reviews of music and personal experiences by Chris Hearn

23.4.07

Birchville Cat Motel “Our Love Will Destroy The World”
CD 2006 Pseudo Arcarna


Campbell Kneale has a Venom T-Shirt. Campbell Kneale has a Mohawk haircut. Campbell Kneale signs his e-mails by pressing enter two or three times followed by CAMPBELL. Campbell Kneale has a doom band called Black Boned Angel. Campbell Kneale headbangs while he performs.

But Campbell hasn’t always been metal. Or else he probably would have strayed using the word cat in the name of his best known project. Or he might have spent his time smoking spliffs and listening to Sabbath, rather than beating us all at life by getting a degree allowing him to make a living teaching art to Catholic school girls and getting months of paid time off every year to spend going on tour. Not to mention just how pretty some of his earlier material is.

“Our Love Will Destroy the World” is an album that I doubt surprised anyone. It only makes sense that Birchville Cat Motel would follow suit with Campbell and release a metal album. And with ridiculous popularity of the new doom/sludge/black metal, it was probably a good time. Have they played Sunn O))) on the OC yet?

I’m staying with family as I write this, and a minute after pushing play on the CD player a 3-year-old walks in and asks me ‘Is Mummy vacuuming?’ Droonnnnneeee. Then Mummy actually does start vacuuming. But yeah, nice comparison there, right on. The drums kick in after a couple of minutes, a loose variation between a snare and hats at around 140bm like a slightly slower blast beat and the usual electronic bagpipes, delayed recorder, etc builds up intensely into track two which is pretty close to what you might call a “song”. A nice steady 4/4, feedback, and something for the Boris fans, building into, wait, real guitar chords! The third track takes a brief break from the feedback that starts at the beginning of the album and follows right through to the end. It’s a nice radio-length slow melodic number that could fit anywhere on a post-rock record, saved only by the sludge preceding it and the organ noise that follows for 5 minutes on the forth track. The disc concludes with a synth-heavy song with plenty of sharp sounds from all directions and more steady drumming.

I’ve listened to around 10 of Birchville’s recordings, and I hate to say that despite its accessibility, this is probably my favourite. The thing is, it’s probably how accessible this CD is that makes it so damn good. It flows like a real album, the songs aren’t too long, and all of the noises have a point and go somewhere, rather than just floating on the same drone for an extended period of time and then fading it out. I loved Chi Vampires, it was the first Campbell record I heard close to feeling like an album, but there was that point in the middle where you’d zone out after by 25 minutes into the second track (which went for 30 something). Not that that was a bad thing, it just became an album that you’d put on while you were doing something else, rather than something that you could pass time listening to. “Our Love Will Destroy the World” contains some previously released recordings, and with the amount of produce Campbell and many of his new drone contemporaries are guilty of releasing and in such limited runs, it seems positive that he could look back upon something and notice how it stands out against some of his other material, and see a context where it would comfortably sit, making something worth keeping in print. In that sense, and also musically, it is the one of his albums that you could file next to The Dead C’s records as an important document of the New Zealand and wider international underground.