Year Of No Light – Ausserwelt

Great pressing. Sound is nice and clear, with good separation of instruments and nice low end resonance (especially on the toms in those dual-drumming passages). My copy has a small hint of pink splatter on the A/B and a couple of faint blue lines on the C/D, anyone else have this?

I don't normally like post rock type stuff. Sure, I appreciate what the genre is all about, the sheer scope and beauty of it seems fantastic on paper, but for the most part I just can't see passed the whole twinkly-twinkly-becomes-epic-climax-in-7-11-minutes thing. Ugh. Build, bash, repeat. Wow, that's art, man. What I like about Year Of No Light however is that they retain the post rock epic and meld it with something more dark and haunting. There are overtones of doom metal galore, and an underlying sense of something altogether more film-scorey. Yes, I just wrote "scorey". It's how they say scary in Liverpool.

This record opens like a slow-motion, mega-HD punch to the face. Guy Ritchie is filming the fucker and after the initial burst you're left reeling backwards in all the sickening, gritty detail you could imagine. Possibly in sepia, too. Equal parts beauty and beast. I initially saw Year Of No Light live at Roadburn 2011 but didn't feel them, but I was attracted to check out this record on the cover art alone. That is how I used to suss out records when I was in my early teens, and it is still quite fun to just go for a record because it fucking looks awesome, although I gotta be honest I end up disappointed more often than not, but now and then a diamond like this will come along and make it all worth while. Bizarrely, I ended up picking up this record at the next Roadburn when Year Of No Light didn't have a set. Genius. Out on a variety of colours thanks to Music Fear Satan.

My C/D disc is black. Was this a screw up, or is the whole pressing actually like this?