Collected here are new songs I heard yesterday that are way off all the usual beaten paths. I have no idea whether you’ll like them, but I sure did. The bands are Cleric (Philadelphia), Phuture Doom (Detroit), and Gates of Aaru (Johannesburg).

CLERIC

There are two bands named Cleric who we’ve written about in the past. The one I want to talk about today is the one from Philadelphia, the one whose 2010 album Regressions I once described as “something like Portal, Blackjazz-vintage Shining, and Behold… the Arctopus communing in a hurricane. During an earthquake.” The fact that the instruments used on the album included the saz, the tenori-on, and the theremin had something to do with my general “what the fuck?!?” attitude about the music.

Cleric are now on tour (check the dates here) and will soon be in Seattle (hell yeah), and today DECIBEL started streaming a new Cleric work named “Resumption”. That’s a fitting title for the song, because Cleric have more or less picked up where Regressions left off three years ago. The song is almost 12 minutes long, and it comes off as a free-form storm of instrumental acrobatics, highly unstable tempos, and throat-rupturing vocals. It jabs like a welterweight, hallucinates like an opium addict, and somersaults like a high-wire acrobat. Continue reading »