Guitarist and dronemaker Lee Stokoe has been a member of the new Skullflower lineup for awhile now, appearing on some of the newer studio and live recordings and performing live with Matt Bower, and his addition to the band has probably been a big factor in the 'Flower's evolution into the furious blackened dronerock behemoth. Also a member of the UK sludge band Marzuraan, this guy keeps pretty busy, and on top of all of this he's still able to crank out new material from his longrunning solo project Culver, which I'm always stoked to hear. Sugar Tip is one of Culver's latest slabs of crushing metallic amp-trance, released on the Chicago industrial label Bloodlust! and packged with Stokoe's signature style of brightly colored and surreal collage art.

The first track "Suicide Crypt" is roaring pit of blacknoise rumble, endless walls of buzzing, grinding, raging distorted drone like a massed Chatham-like army of doom metal guitarists all playing the same single chord behind a cascade of roiling low-end rumble and threads of humming high-end drone that almost sound like orchestral strings distended from massive gravitations pull. For more than twenty-one minutes this piece stretches out, a massive wall of roaring distorted dronebuzz, a purely ambient noisewall that undergoes only the most subtle chordal shifts.

At just two minutes, the middle track "I Know You're Alone" is just an interlude between the two other larger tracks, a swirl of muted low-end thrum and murky cosmic winds obscuring a vague melodic pulse, droning and dark kosmiche drift that leads straight into the final distorto-drone epic...

"Suicide Witch", like the first track, is both minimal and massive, a single feedback drone writhing serpentine through cosmic clouds of warbling high-end shimmer and thick metallic buzz, a mighty blackened raga buzzing through the void, Sunroof-style. As this goes on, the soft smears of ambient hum and metallic resonance that float around this roaring static raga-drone undergo slight shifts, forming into eerie fragments of melody that evolve ever so slightly over the track's twenty-three minutes, winding down at the end as the drones are stripped down layer by layer until all that remains is a throbbing electrical hum at the end.

Fans of Sunroof, Vulture Club, Ajilsvga, Birchville Cat Motel, RST, To Blacken The Pages, and other guitar-centric heavy psychedelic drone outfits, here's another crushing psychdrone archtitect for you to zone out to!