fishermen: patterns & paths

The Skudge imprint is growing, along with its artists, and they're now ready to embrace longer formats, a testimony to the future and more than anything a continuous effort to grasp the present's relevancy. After their wonderful EP from a year ago, the Fishermen are ready to take you on a diving trip with their very first album, an accomplishment in itself. With Patterns and Paths, Thomas Jaldemark (YTA) and Martin Skogehall (MRSK, Smell The Flesh) have crafted a rather mesmerizing story of abstract and figurative tropes altogether, and "eerie" is probably the best word to describe the general mood of this, but hard with a raw eeriness. The affair starts with "Greenhorn," gentle foreplay setting the tone for an imminent journey into the lightless abysses. "Hope is Gone" further enhances the incoming grim turn of events in a coil-like fashion before "Serpents" makes your feet and hips take over your fear of the unknown. The trance has indeed begun and you soon enter a hidden warehouse rave cave of un-earthly shamanism, the unforgiving stomp of "Get None." "Dyspnea" manages to find a path into deeper regions, the groove shifting towards a darker funk with "Lost Teeth," a Caribbean techno banger that'd wake any zombie in the making. "The Four Skulls" suddenly hints at a safer journey with healing percs and melancholic pads, but "Rise" soon shatters those false hopes with an evil, motorik groove. Then you hit "Scurvy," where the pace slows down a little only to introduce the seductive side of this gloomy adventure, a challenge to your feet, inducing lascivious moves. Keeping you in a trance, "In Solitude" combines both previous tracks' strengths with an added Twin Peaks value. Now finally reaching the far bottom of the ocean, the mood gets even more claustrophobic with "Sunken Mosque," the last stage of this trance before returning to the surface. Indeed, if "Torments" lets you catch a breath of air, it is filled with minerals, the world above has changed, and you might very well feel safer back under the water, a reverse mirror to Mike Ink's old Gas project.