Metal Bandcamp: Drug Honkey

May 27, 2017

Drug Honkey - Cloak of Skies

Artwork of Paolo Girardi.

It's been five years now since Drug Honkey released Ghost in the Fire and I remember how it totally blew me away. So I was in eager anticipation of Cloak of Skies from the moment it was announced.

And what can I say, yeah, they did it again. Cloak of Skies speaks the language of my dungeoned demons and unleashes them to scare the shit out of me, in the most positive sense.

The four piece band from Chicago/Illinois continues the path of their unique approach to psychedelic Death Doom Metal, with industrial elements and an extreme and extensive usage of sound effects.

This time they keep the underlying structures a bit more recognizable so they don't appear completely unhinged. The songs are definitely rooted in death/doom riffs and groove and are of a minimalistic structure, but don't leave you any less disturbed and terrified, by their nightmarish, dystopian soundscapes they roll out.

And this time they also have two guest appearances, Bruce Lamont (Yakuza, Corrections House) and Justin K. Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu).

The first song "Pool of Failure" is like a huge droning engine gets started inviting you to a psychedelic trip... to the deepest, darkest chambers of your soul? ...or to hell? Anyway, this is a slow motion nightmare... an invitation impossible to decline, because it's as compelling as it is insane.

In the following "Sickening Wasteoid" more sorts of distorted sounds are added. Waves of synths like waves of hot, filthy lava push, drag and press you through an atmosphere so thick it's nearly unbreathable and so toxic it hurts your lungs and it fills your brain with nauseating dizziness.

Fast oscillating sounds, staccato like stoically monotonous vocals add a sense of a malfunctioning system and growing insanity in "Outlet of Hatred". Too much of all this filth threatens to leave you just stuck in it.

And despite the climactic build up of "(It's Not) The Way" that creates an intense, ritualistic and hypnotic atmosphere and a torturing insane climax at the end, there's no feel of a cleansing, a turning point or any kind of relief.

"The Oblivion of An Opiate Nod" steers everything into a storm of blazing, blistering pain and paranoia.

In the title song "Cloak of Skies", finally, things get to the point. The appearance of Lamont's saxophone here, introduces a sense of soberness and sanity with its clean, clear tone, but is placed into the most chaotic, most psychotic song of the entire album and the lonely sound of normality brilliantly clashes with all the madness, pain and filth in a kind of showdown. If it ends in salvation or apocalypse, who knows.

Again Drug Honkey created aural insanity, turned psychosis into sound. Their unique and extensive use of synths, effects and industrial noise elements brings properties to their sound that are essential for the atmosphere the band conjures throughout the 50 minutes of lysergic insanity.

And especially the vocal quality has the most eerie and horrifying effects on me. The extreme modulation and distortion of the human voice, like it's done here, carries a creepy sense of man morphing into monster.

But in the end you come out of this. The last song releases you from the psychedelic nightmare, but, like this is a remix of the first song "Pool of Failure" by Justin Broadrick, you come out with your brain remixed.

The song "Sickening Wasteoid" is featured on The Wicked Lady Show 140

February 17, 2014

Drug Honkey - Ghost in the Fire

By Ulla Roschat.

When I listen to an album for the first time I do it with headphones, if possible. So I did with Drug Honkey’s album Ghost in the Fire. This was basically my first encounter with this band’s music. It was twice, during this first listen, that I pulled the headphones from my ears to check if the sensations happening in my head would go away when I do and I even considered shortly to stop listening at all, but I continued (maybe addiction had already set in?).

With “sensations in my head” I don’t mean pictures and thoughts in my brain, but rather in my head as a physical place, so that a strange desire appeared to open my own skull to see if there are “things” in it that had no business there ,things that were able to unleash my carefully dungeoned demons.

Drug Honkey are a four piece Chicago IL. based band that formed in 1999 and Ghost in the Fire (May 2012) is their fifth album. In terms of genre categorization the music is something like experimental, psychedelic, electronic, industrial, Sludge Doom, but actually it is a sonic mindfuck, psychosis turned into sound, endless torture and pain condensed into a lysergic addictive drug named Ghost in the Fire.

The basic structure of the songs is kind of minimalistic. There’s rarely something you could call melody or a dramatic build up. The songs are somehow crawling, creeping and wavering along, carried by riffs that are stretched and slow and barely recognizable, fuzzy heavy bass lines and an incredibly slow plodding drumming. An almost permanent, slightly varying droning background sound induces an uneasy feel that accumulates into a kind of sickness not unlike a naupathia from the soft but permanent sway on a long time boat trip.

The multiple layers of electronic effects, distorted sounds, industrial noise create an incredible dense atmosphere, a lysergic hallucinatory disturbing soundscape immersing everything in a boiling thick viscous filth, painfully slow, heavy and dissonant.

The most effective element enhancing the eerie psychotic atmosphere are the vocals. These vocals that appear in nearly every possible form utterable by a human being and often additionally electronically modulated sound strangely humanly unhuman and really freak me out, scare the shit out of me and speak to my unleashed demons.

All of this is put together so carefully and cleverly like a well directed horror movie.

The first extreme listening effects that caused me to pull off the headphones lessen of course later, which is a good thing... for one thing I have to cope with my demons and get them back in the dungeon, and for another thing I can enjoy this masterpiece of diabolical psychedelic heaviness much better when I’m not scared to death.