Toner Low
III

In these times of relentless darkness, where the soul is almost annihilated by the economic-continental pettiness of a delirious and Facebook-dependent humanity, a dull vibration propagates itself, remaining imperceptible to any soul.

Green like the nausea we all feel at the innocent spark of the beloved Digital (not so) Terrestrial, the color of the cover of this sublime work opens mental doors we never dreamed we could enjoy amidst the silent contemporary European uproar.

Because I try, believe me, to enjoy all the contemporary stoner-doom pomposity... but for at least four years now, I think there's little, indeed, very little stuff that can make me perk up like a prime minister in search of stripped and dancing Arcorian troubles. And as always, because time is anything but a stupid farce, only bands that have known the dawns of the first half of the past decade can give me (and perhaps, perpendicularly, give You) audio-projecting splendors like the album in question.

We're talking about the divine Toner Low, a Dutch trio that deserves recognition for their precious (and rare) gift of effective simplification, poured out through tons of sound waves that find their ultimate collector, the very same (and coincidentally the very last) studio work denominated with the numeric appellation III (2013 – Bilocation/Roadkill Recordz). Bottomless opiate seas will fall, compact and delicate, on your ears, (in my opinion) too oriented towards the ever-growing and marketing-driven Roadburnian conformity. Well, if I could do it in person, I would enthusiastically thank people like this, who, probably drawing inspiration from benchmarks of the field like Sleep, Bongzilla, Earth, Sons Of Otis and not last, the very Italian Ufomammut (from whom I find some ancient and now lost compositional strategies), honor the god of the most esoteric Stoner-Doom, doped, expanding, reassuring, psycho-delirious, and simultaneously spiritual/generating.

The composition is equipped with four phases (or Phases, to be more precise), which couldn’t better describe what the mind attributes to its own essence once spread and subjected to the greenish abandonment of the sweet, sweetest seven-pointed leaf. Phase Six, Phase Seven, Phase Eight, and Phase Nine are in order the crackling and lush tracks that would sublimate the rationality of any intellectual-situationist-pseudo-politician of our damned and terminal days, in which a civilization like ours sees nothing else (or wants nothing else but to watch, impotent) a phase of blatant and irreversible decline. Improbable but spot-on little organs, shrill and obscene analog-synthesized litanies, orgasmic bass riffs overheated by the might of ultra-high-wattage valves, and feedbacks as annoying as rust in the veins, will be the only and ruthless variations on a single theme: barrages and barrages and barrages and barrages, and barrages and barrages and barrages of good, old, seventies stoner-doom.

Only discrepancy: a tragic finale, in which a solemn piano emits notes that couldn’t better represent the end of times, and the beginning of something new and enigmatic.

One of those trips that would send the planet Earth off in an instant.

One of those trips you take while locked in your workplace, planning your escape from the rest of humanity.

One of those trips you would take immediately, without hesitation, escaping from a self-imposed relationship/imprisonment without sense or reason.

One of those trips that should be taken by many, indeed very many, of those gentlemen who base their muscle-gym self-improvement equipped with supplements, the only and masturbatory escape route from a life now devoid of any logical and directionless sexual-dysfunctional sense.

Be silent, for once.

Finally, a fucking trip.