Review: Lush Worker - Serum

In my previous post, an interview with Aidan Baker, I made mention of "a few musicians......who have an extraordinary ability to produce music in both quantity and quality". Completely coincidentally this review concerns another of those musicians....Mike Vest. As any psych/noise lover would know Vest is integral in a great many fantastic outfits - Blown Out, Haikai No Ku, Melting Hand, Dodge Meteor to mention just a handful - and Lush Worker of course. 'Serum' is the new one from Lush Worker and is "Compositions using Electric Saz, Shruti Box and Guitars" and it is a doozy. What makes this new one so special is the change of emphasis from cavernous, riff-filled noise to something more exotically drone based.

That being said however, 'Jiangshi Law' opens with lashings of feedback and those trademark roiling riffs that I'm sure Vest can knock out in his sleep, those magnificent waves of sound that are the musical equivalent to the facehuggers in 'Alien' - they are almost suffocatingly dense and make you feel as though your brain is being slowly sucked from your head. But even in this glorious density there are flashes of a more drone based approach that make this more immersive than, say, 'Atmosphere Collapsium' or 'Realms'. It is on 'Haemochromatosis' that these drones really come to the fore..the aforementioned exotic instrumentation lending things an otherworldly feel...the lush drones from the shruti box are incredibly mesmeric, to the point of inducing reverie. Layers and layers of drone are added until it becomes something really magical. The third, and final, track, 'Beyond Architect' is a neat, and long, amalgam of the two approaches; the billowing rollers of riffs are there but sit on top of some dark and cavernous drones and the overall effect is one of a claustrophobic detachment from reality.....you are held suspended in a trance, a place where the dark is split by flickering shards of colour. It is a meditation tape for serial killers.

This is not so much a departure for Lush Worker, more of a case of more ammunition added to the armoury. As with all of Vest's output it is heavy and dense and deeply psychedelic. The drones are immense and complement the majesty of Vest's guitar beautifully. It is a collection of tracks that demand a listen...so head to the Lush Worker Bandcamp site here and download immediately!