Skullflower

Despite the fact that it has recently turned into more or less a different incarnation of Hototogisu (not a bad thing really, but it isn't really Skullflower either), Skullflower in its early days was a glorious antecedent to everything people thought noise, psychedelia, and punk were supposed to be. It combines everything that sounds perfect on paper (and it's perfect in real life too), stomping doom-garage riffs, harsh layers of hallucinatory feedback, open but dark isolationistic ambience, a power electronics derived (considering the resume of its members) obsession with death and deviancy, a tendency to break open into extended, unstructured improvisation, but return to form just when it gets excessive enough (that doesn't mean any god damn fade offs once everyone starts soloing, to half quote Steven Stapleton). This is noise and this is rock, but this ain't goofy mathcore made by college students. It's everything hard psychedelic music ever wanted to be (I think of how much territory Skullflower covers that stoner rock is supposed to but fails miserably).