Slow White Fall - Pushing Through a Wall (2020)

Industrial changeling Oliver Ho returns to his Slow White Fall alias for a howling and paganistic suite of industrial music in an English medieval Gothic mode channelling Dead Can Dance via Killing Joke, Scott Walker, Silent Servant and Godflesh.

Slow White Fall is the latest of Ho’s revolving monikers (Broken English Club, Raudive, Zov Zov), and here used to signify a shift into more muscular Industrial music that treads heavily to the right side of fantasy dramatic, wrought with a finely crafted atmospheric finesse that speaks to decades of crookedly functional electronic production expertise and an enduring fascination with the darkside. Think ritual music for a bacchanal at John Dee’s gaff, or the soundtrack to a plague rave held in 1347.

‘Pushing Through A Wall’ marks up as Ho’s most ambitious and convictive collapsing of industrial tropes into bleached out acid noise and dungeon gloom. Over the cursed course of seven tracks he works at the tipping point where noise metastasises into a form of industrial blues for the end of days ranging from Adrian Sherwood-era Ministry styles, to Datura-induced panic attack heartbeats and chalkboard sax in ‘Earthquake Seducer’, and Coil-ed noise in ‘The Golden Lunatic Ascending’, with raging highlights in the fanged arps of ‘A Crimson Body’, and a closing couplet of duets meshing doom guitars to sparing etheric female vox with strong echoes of Sunn 0))) & Scott Walker’s ‘Soused’ as much as an instrumental take on Godflesh’s brum doom.