God Root Archives - NO CLEAN SINGING

While each of the four tracks on the new album by Philadelphia’s God Root could have a nerve-wracking and even devastating effect on your emotional well-being if heard alone, Salt and Rot was quite clearly planned as a unified piece of music, a single well-orchestrated descent into madness. Part crushing death ritual and part hallucinatory fall into a lightless abyss where there’s very little to hold onto, where fear and emotional breakdown are the fracturing orders of the day, the album is staggeringly powerful, stunningly bleak and disorienting, and also unforgettable. Before you know it, it has you in its clutches and pulls you into its calamitous and narcotically vaporous vortex, extinguishing the will to resist.

Salt and Rot will be released by Horror Pain Gore Death Productions on July 11th — tomorrow. To help pave this now-very-short path to its advent, we have a full stream today. My best advice is to set aside 33 minutes for uninterrupted listening, and then the rest of the day for recovery. Continue reading »

This just-released debut EP by a new band from Philadelphia really is one that must be heard all the way through, from start to finish. Yes, you can randomly pick any one of the four tracks and still find yourself rooted in place, taking it in and finding your emotional state altered by what you hear. But the cumulative impact of the four in sequence is pulverizing.

God Root is organized with an introduction (“Spirits Rise”) coming first, followed by a long song called “Of Habit”, a comparatively brief interlude (“Bog Ascending”), and another long song named “Of Control” to finish the sequence.

“Spirits Rise” sets the stage for this dismal pageant with the reverberation of ritual drumbeats, a solemn tribal rhythm backed by the shimmer of unsettling ambient tones and shamanistic wailing. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GOD ROOT — “SALT AND ROT”

SHORT BUT SWEET: GOD ROOT — “GOD ROOT”