Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Circle of Ouroborus - Eleven Fingers (2011)

Full Length, Handmade Birds Records
August, 2011
































Genre: Black Metal/Experimental/Post-Punk
Region: Finland

Been waiting on this to show up on my doorstep. This of course is the latest release from Finish two piece Circle of Ouroborus who have a tradition of creating murky, low-fi, experimental black metal/post-punk. They're kind of hard to pin down genre-wise and have quite a catalogue of releases which are all equally strange; many of which I haven't had time to get to except for a few full lengths (Tree of Knowledge, Unituli, etc.). Having said that those that I have heard I found that they can be hit or miss for me but Eleven Fingers is different in that regard as I enjoyed everything on this release and felt compelled to spin it again immediately afterward. It may be their best work yet.

If you want a good idea of what you'll get from Eleven Fingers you should check out the track Warpath. It's a difficult release to describe. The seven songs here are draped in a mystical cold haze, their sound has not changed greatly from past releases outside of being very refined here. Eleven Fingers has a very laid back, thick, melodic atmosphere while still being engaging and intense. Vocals (as always) are 90% clean but not in a traditional sense, they have a mournful droning quality complimenting well with the soft guitars and hypnotic drumming. Brief moments of harsher vocals do appear (a few passages at most) and there are no acoustic moments here as in some previous albums. Circle of Ouroborus have always had such a strange and compelling sound and this seems like the best expression of it to date.

Distinctive, entrancing and dreamy. I'm really enjoying Eleven Fingers a ton and would recommend it even if you haven't heard their past work. It really does encompass perfectly Circle of Ouroborus' unique sound while still being accessible to some degree. Fans of Have a Nice Life, Mamaleek, and Murmuure may be interested in this.

UPDATE: Links fixed. Now both CD and Vinyl rips are up! (UPDATED: 21/03/2012)

DOWNLOAD (Zippyshare) CD
DOWNLOAD (Zippyshare) VINYL

11 comments:

  1. I'm a fucking noob. Long time reader, first time poster. This blog has been invaluable in my discover of new metal and I thank you for that. Anyway, I really want to hear this, but the rar package is empty when I download it. This has been happening a lot actually when I dl stuff from your blog.

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  2. Thanks Adam. I don't know why this happens occasionally with some readers. I just tried both links, unrar'd them and had no problems. I'll re-compress/re-upload the file and see if it's fixed but I don't do anything unusual when zippping files.

    What other posts have you had problems with recently?

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  3. Hmm...off the top of my head the new Absu release, Bestial Raids, and Sortilegia. It may be a software issue on my end, because the files are there I just can't unarchive them. I may try downloading another unrar-ing program...what's weird though is that it only happens with packages from this blog. Thanks for your help!

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  4. Yep. I just downloaded stuffit for os x and it worked fine. I was using unrarx before. Thanks again.

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  5. Hey, by the way, i download this file that came in .rar, as a Mac user i use UnrarX, but it said it wasn't a .rar file, so i changed the extension of the file from .rar to .zip and it worked perfectly.

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  6. Alright thanks for the feedback guys, much appreciated. FYI I'm going to get a better quality rip of this in a little while, as well as the two splits that were recently posted.

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  7. Replies
    1. Done. Most mediafire links are down (making an account soon) so for now it's mainly zippyshare

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  8. This comment has been removed by the author.

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