Visual artist and musician Marco del Rio has plumbed the infernal depths as He Who Crushes Teeth, co-founder of the legendary black metal band Bone Awl. That project has been on hiatus since 2011, the year that he founded Raspberry Bulbs, which began initially as a solo project, before expanding into a five piece after the release of del Rio’s Nature Tries Again (Hospital Productions), that year. On November 17th, Raspberry Bulbs will return with their newest LP effort Privacy, due out via Blackest Ever Black. The label describes the album as: “a defence of the anti-social, the secretive, and the inward-looking; a call to resist the contemporary obsession with “connection”, exhibitionism and peer approval”, while pointing out that, “…the band’s most important influences are not musical, but literary: in particular the “weird fiction” of Lovecraft, Machen, Chambers et al.”
Indeed, “Light Surrounds Me“, the album’s second track, is suffused by odd turns of logic and a haunting energy. The cut begins by warily drawing one in with an eery hum of factory room ambience, before suddenly switching gears and coalescing into quite the howling and rabid beast. As Privacy was recorded to four-track, “Light Surrounds Me” sears and hisses with a visceral immediacy that seems on the verge of collapsing under the band’s maelstrom of primitive gutter punk and del Rio’s black metal vocal attack!
