FIELDS OF MILDEW “The Complete Woes”

By Octopi Mills

The reading of the promo text says this of the project:

"FIELDS OF MILDEW is a German minimalist dark folk project channeling both the cruel hardship and austere beauty of human dwelling in unforgiving surroundings."

There are also comparisons to KATATONIA and this could be found as accurate. The first song overstays it welcome and sets the pace for a suicide scenario in the feeling that it evokes. The second song sounds as if it drives this point further, and I feel like I am standing around a barrel fire at times.

"Triad of Incomplete Woes" is what this little number was called. The impression of the first of this album gives the feeling that one has been a rodent crushed by a motor car wheel on a slow, cold, gray and misty morning and the driver never cared of the process; this death over life business where one dons a tie and suits up to meet the occasion.

The term “mildew” holds meaning in this whole sound and style; the dead, worthless, stale situation these folk have set out to record. "Nostalgia" is another terrible morning around the burn barrel in some alley with a winter cold and cough. "Fog" goes nowhere, a big zero, and brings you along with it into some awful place where pets have died and dead relatives will never be seen again.The feeling of being high on vintage cough medicine and being sick with it permeates the air with this music, as if one is stuck in bed in an old grey, paint peeled room with no color or life. "A Nether World" comes and what can be said? It is the molded flower in the vase of a long vacated waiting room in some crumbling city that doesn't exist anymore. Black and white would be the format if this were a film and if it were a German one set in a bombed out shell of a Dresden hospital slum, then that would be the sort of thing I experience when hearing this. The vocals narrate the the thing nicely; weakly, bleak, repetitive, colorless.

SOUND POLLUTION RECORDS

FIELDS OF MILDEW