The Cosmic Dead
The Exalted King

This album here is not a new release, but rather a reissue, specifically the reissue of the second LP by The Cosmic Dead.

'The Exalted King' was originally released five years ago, on July 23, 2012, practically a year after the debut album of the Glasgow-based group, via Cosmik Eye. However, a joint operation between Sky Lantern Records and Cardinal Fuzz has brought this work back to light, published in a double vinyl limited edition.

The operation, besides being appreciated by collectors and those who always demand the best quality from their listening experiences, was also an opportunity to expand the offering to listeners with the addition of an extra track that was missing from the original release and here has been added to complement the three original tracks.

Released last April, 'The Exalted King' is a work that clearly more than the subsequent works, maximizes the long acid trance sessions typical of this group and what are its most obsessive and experimental drives.

Omar Aborida, Lewis Cook, Julian Dicken, James T McKay, the genesis of this album dates back to 2011/12, a work that is fundamentally centered on the title track, a powerful free-roaming psych-rock session divided into two parts with a total duration of over thirty minutes. The first part stands out for its more suggestive sounds and full of space-music reverberations, while the second, after a 'backflow' phase, unleashes in the finale into a madly crescendo of kraut.

'Anatta', the second track, has a much more solemn and lapidary style, the overall sound looks more at certain episodes of 70s progressive music in the use of instrumentation and analog synths, while also taking advantage of certain impressions suggested by the use of electric guitars in an unconventional and noise-making manner; 'Khartomb', the 'unreleased' track that was not included in the album's original release, is a surprising episode of heavy-psych shamanism that alone truly gives a sense to this reissue operation, while the concluding 'Anaphora' is a kind of ritual whose atmospheres can make one think of a certain 70s science fiction and those dark rituals carried out, for example, in the second episode of the 'Planet of the Apes' series ('Beneath The Planet of the Apes'), where in the ruins of St. Patrick's Cathedral, a society of mutant men with telepathic powers worships an unexploded atomic bomb as a deity. Hallucinations of nuclear wars alternate with those of primitive men dancing around the flames trying to uncover the nature of that mystery which will later be revealed by Prometheus. In a rarefied atmosphere dominated by the powerful and impressive sound of bass and noise regurgitations, Icarus takes flight in his father's Daedalus's wake to escape the labyrinth and reach the sun, becoming one with it.

A record that for enthusiasts is practically unmissable and even if you declare yourself tired of listening to this kind of heavy-psych sessions, you now have the opportunity to (re)discover it, considering it for what it is: namely a fundamental piece from a group that in the genre has been and surely is one of the leading exponents of recent years.