AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DRUG HONKEY — “THE OBLIVION OF AN OPIATE NOD”

 

Of all the intensely disturbing tracks on Drug Honkey‘s latest album, Cloak of Skies, “The Oblivion of an Opiate Nod“, is not only the longest but probably the most brutally obliterating. The album as a whole is a hopeless and often hellish soundscape, but this one is a weapon of destruction that becomes devastating on multiple levels. It’s a bone-crusher, but it also triggers nightmarish visions that don’t soon go away. No wonder the band chose the song as the subject of their new video, which we’re presenting today.

The hallucinatory effect of the music is likely to spawn different blood-freezing dreams for different people, because we all bring parts of ourselves to the experience of listening to music such as this. It becomes an interactive process, in ways that just don’t happen with a lot of music. In the case of this video, Drug Honkey‘s Paul Gillis (aka Honkey Head) brought his own tortured imaginings into play (beyond what’s expressed by his harrowing vocals and frightening synths), because he made the video himself.

 

 

There are moments in the video when Drug Honkey bring the hammer down, and at those moments, planets explode, buildings are blasted to smithereens, nuclear weapons unleash hellfire. The imagery is fitting, because in those moments the song becomes absolutely pulverizing. But, as previously observed, the track works on other levels as well. As the song’s name suggests, it’s emotionally ruinous and mentally destabilizing.

As mountainously heavy as the music becomes, it includes sounds and sensations that induce feelings of queasiness, and dread. Like an opiate dream, it subverts reality and casts your mind adrift in a surreal, swirling miasma where nothing seems real… where you find your own terrors, which have been given free rein by the music to come forth from those dark crevices where you’ve tried to imprison them. And Gillis‘ video expresses the music’s unreal, doomed quality through imagery that’s just as surreal and unnerving as the sounds.

 

 

Cloak of Skies was released by Transcending Obscurity Records last year, but the album has now been reissued in special gold box sets (limited to 100 copies) that include a sticker for the band’s new logo (pictured above), which perhaps gives some hints about where the band intend to go next with their music, as well as other items. For more info, check the links below. And then steel your nerves and check out our premiere of Drug Honkey‘s video for “The Oblivion of an Opiate Nod“.

Order:
https://drughonkey.bandcamp.com/

Drug Honkey:
https://www.facebook.com/drughonkey/

Transcending Obscurity Records:
https://tometal.com/