Haikai No Ku is the very noisy and psychedelic offspring of Mike Vest (of stonedoomers Bong), Sam Booth (of raw black metal acts Auldfued and Rife) and Jerome Smith. It has been described as 'death toll blues' by some and I can kind of get that. There is an underlying bluesy vibe to it. However, I feel it is much more rooted in pyschedelica and krautrock. Very monotonous and repetitive to induce a trance-like state. I am a total sucker for this kind of monotonous psychedelic sound and I found myself cranking up the volume to totally immerse myself in it. They take the basic setup of drums, bass and guitar and rock it out on slow, instrumental doomy psych jams. It has a very improvised, raw feel to it which hugely adds to its charm. Soaring lead guitar rises up from a swamp of pounding drums and throbbing bass and walls of feedback are pulled up to create a dense, dark atmosphere. There is nothing overly technical about the whole album. It is stripped to the essentials with a huge load of feedback and noise heaped on top of it. On top of that, the track 'Sleep on Horseback' even sounds like a very noisy Loop, which is a very, very good thing indeed! Any band that manages to recall Loop gets massive bonus points from me.Doom fans who like their music raw and psychedelic; Psych fans who don't mind a bit (okay, a LOT) of noise; Noiserockers who don't mind that the tempo slows down to a crawl; adventurous Krautrockers; all these folks can add Haikai No Ku to their list of bands to check out. Excellent stuff! And even more bonus point for the creepy Japanese inspired psychedelic artwork! www.merchantsofair.com