Marumari
The Wolves Hollow
(Carpark Records)
I'm a sucker for small-label releases. I've admitted that time and time again within this music review section, and once again I've found another small label that has been releasing really great things for quite some time now for a relatively cheap amount of money. For quite some time now, I'd heard the name Carpark Records thrown around, but only recently did I finally look them up even closer and investigate further.
Although they've released work by Kid 606 and Jake Mandell, Marumari seems to be the label stalwart (his fourth release, Supermogadon just came out last month), and after hearing both of them, I've come to the conclusion that he's also a highly consistent artist. The funny thing is that for all the wacky premises of the release (it structures itself around a story that alien-wolves who came to earth to harvest cow-brains for power were fought off by earth wolves), it's simply an excellent electronic release from a young fellow (living in the Northeast United States. The funny cover art was even painted by his mom.
Given the strange background on the disc, I know that I was expecting something completely freak-out upon popping in the release, but that wasn't entirely what I got. After an almost minute-long opening of eerie noises on the first track "The Wolf's Howl," things drop off into sort of a lurching rhythm that gets slightly more skewered with bubbley-sounding beats before winding down with a fairly nice beat and some warm tones laid in behind it all. The second track "Searching For The Sasha Wolf" mixes some cut-up female vocals into a track that is somewhat similar in the elements that it's constructed with, but moves in a different direction than the slightly more harsh first track.
The middle section of the disc goes in a bit more metallic sounding direction, as "Another Sphere Was Plundered" throws in some squelched-out noises while the shorter two-part track "Carnivorous Temptations" adds a lot of hissing and scratching to some feedback-laden beats. "Birth Of The Cub Cyborg" is a haunting, glitchy sounding track that fits the title perfectly.
Towards the end of the album, things almost get dancy on "Subwolfer" before dropping into a bit of lush-sounding goodness (ala Boards Of Canada) on "War Of the Wolves." One of the my only small beefs with the disc is that there are several shorter tracks of about a minute or so on the disc that really don't develop into anything. Most of them don't take anything away from the proceedings, but several of them don't really add anything either (except for a funny name in the case of "I Left My Donut In The Dilithium Chamber"). Still, this is a great little 45-minute album, and definitely worth the money (I got mine from the label website for 11 dollars postage paid and it arrived supa-fast).
Rating: 7.5
