LOW FLYING HAWKS “Fuyu”

By Octopi Mills

With a name like LOW FLYING HAWKS and an album here that's supposed to mean winter in Japanese, one knows he is either in for something good or weird. The album is said to be based on the Greek myth of Sisyphos, King of Corinth, perhaps part of the third of albums in some kind of Trilogy....but I read there is a fascination with Japanese themes in the band's schemes. These guys classify their music as "doomgaze", which is fitting for the plodders and the overall sound, which is like witnessing a depressing scenario. The music is dreamy and follows a flow of a stream as such. The guitars chord in a down tempo and the vocals croon around like a balloon animal crossing in a dark, rainy city, having a tone like the old forgotten sludge of a band once called ISIS, without sounding too much like that. If you were looking for WAYLON JENNINGS or mistook the name for a clam shack place on the outside of Rhode Island, you were wrong and need to turn around.

The first three songs somehow blew by me and I thought they were one, somehow, and this has been my big shock so far as the song "Midnight" bleeds like wet, thin paint on a sign without post, and it sounds as if people are high around here and I'll grab a lager. The slow drone of track number 4 has vocals that rub me backwards and makes me feel depressed or high, I confess this. "Fuyu" has some electronic scale that makes a blocky, digital feeling well up in me and by "Darklands" I know that I have been had; given the syrupy medicine of shoegaze for a cold I could have met with Scottish Whiskey. The dreadfully ill feeling is dramatized by a violinist and a change of guitar patterns that make for a long, sick ride with our low flying pals here. "Solar Wind" is perfect weather to kill yourself out in granddad's auld root cellar under a mustard yellow sky plucked from the Rider Waite tarot deck whilst "Caustic Wing" is a good thing to crash a plane into a windmill to. "Winter Star" shines like dim rhinestone in a dream about a night club and has that thick, hazy, syrupy, dreary, windy, fuzzy, sickly feeling with some deep sounds that swirl and funnel in opium delirium nevermore. "Nightrider" is the final side effect before death or hangover takes over, and the passenger is under control of the rider here who is young and new, riding off with a light ray gun into the city on a swirl of halogen euphoria, riding bare arse, bareback where the hitch hiker has vowed to never go again. One can never deny the ride was stranger than the normal horse coach through the countryside. High as hell, dreamy, off puttingly refreshing and as much as I hate to say it because I don't like the music much it was an interesting take on music. I can see this getting big...

MAGNETIC EYE RECORDS

LOW FLYING HAWKS