Locust Of The Dead Earth – Mithridate

This record hit me out of nowhere. I’d never heard about Locust Of The Dead Earth before I clicked play and the first and self-titled piece of Mithridate started streaming from Nostril Records’ bandcamp page.

It’s a free donation digital record of a one-man drone / doom / experimental project and it’s actually not bad at all. Especially that first song and it’s sticky, sick and tiny melody, which is struggling so hard to survive the murky and fuzzy environment of Márcio’s heavily droning guitar. However after few minutes its cool and almost static atmosphere is destroyed by quite a generic high-pitched solo, and this is sadly something happening during the whole record.

Mithridate is full of great ideas, but often they are destroyed by a pointless zeal for complexity, which for me is killing the primal and fragile atmosphere that could have made this record perfect. I hope in his next endeavors Márcio will abandon the irrelevant heavy metal solos and cheap synthetic drum sampling, and try to focus on the subtle fuzzy soundscapes and minimalist melodies that are scattered here and there in this lengthy, but modest and interesting record. A bit better production won’t do harm too. And by the way, if the Top Gun theme song had to be rearranged as a drone doom piece I’d totally assign this task to the Locust, just check out They Didn’t Seem Miserable and maybe you’ll get my idea, or maybe I’m just fucked in the head.