Another Desolation House title that I pulled out of the depths of the past, this was the one and only album from the duo of David Sullivan (Last Of The Juanitas, Magwheels) and Jason Crumer, both of whom also played in the cult Southern sludge band Facedowninshit that had an album on Relapse back in the 2000s. Under the Amazing Grace banner, Crumer and Sullivan used Christian iconography and themes of Christian revivalism to explore immense, cavernous dark ambient soundfields using guitar and electronics. It's pure mood, the lovely six-panel digipak covered in old, sepia-colored images of wood churches, tent revivals, and rusted surfaces, and the sounds on Revival Times feel like they could be traveling through these structures and events, a solemn soundtrack to still-extant undercurrents of religious belief in the first half of the twentieth century.

From the start, the duo craft billowing clouds of massive, murky drone and muffled feedback, slowly churning fogscapes of bass-heavy thrum that remain constant as dramatic , almost orchestral guitar noise and electronics sweep up from below. This conjures an ecstatic awesomeness that is on par with the work of the Troum / Maeror Tri guys, but they put thir own stamp on this roiling, iridescent ambience with interesting applications of controlled feedback and effects pedals, choral-like sounds alighting like angelic beings above this ocean of whirr and roar, eerie currents of slightly distorted sound coursing through the air.. It's all very beautiful and awe-inspiring, like the opening symphonic blast of "Os, Itighaho". But "Sunday" presents something a bit more psychologically unsettling, the track unfolding into a coarse blur of old voices, crumbling mechanical noise, swells of liquid low-end guitar, with abrasive drones and distant dissonant wailing notes floating against the background. It's still pretty gorgeous, teeming with those layers of lush ambient guitar sound, but the strange machinelike scrapes and mutterings make it more unsettling than the other, more elegiac songs on the album. Sullivan's formless guitar work is one of the main foundations of the music, weaving long, winding single-note drones, washes of crystalline shimmer, deep floating tremors that echo endlessly, and every so often, sculpting a poignant melody that floats, fragile and delicate, over the slowly swirling mass of sound.

"Blind Man's Ears" is another one of the creepier tracks on here, pulsating with a weird muted throb while the guitar drift turns atonal. It abruptly cuts off, with the following track "Blind" suddenly plunging this forbidding driftscape down into blacker, more stygian depths. Rumbling amplifiers throb endlessly, small glimmers of cautious plucked strings fusing to an ominous two-note figure hovering in darkness, only occasional shafts of electroni8c light piercing through the vast sea of sound. Weird percussive thumps and minimal pieces of melody appear and disappear, and this tension between that solemn, reverential diaphanous drone and the slightly harsher, rhythmic moments make this more intense compared to other guitar-centric dark ambient discs. Crumer of course infests these rumbling, shimmering, gliding drone-fields with all kinds of electronic particulate and buzzing circuit-abuse, likewise weaving his sounds throi8gh and around the benthic depths of the music. He's pretty restrained here compared to the much more violent electronic noise that he creates either with American Band, Aluminum Noise, or under his own name, weaving a deft touch over his instruments and devices, carefully shaping each burst of metallic skree and tangle of distorted noise. Towards the end, it all gets even more unsettling as "Faith Healing (Symbols)" dives into a cavernous arena filled with indistinguishable shouting voices, rattling percussive sounds, whirling low-end hum, and strange skeletal clatter that builds to a frightening din of disembodied chanting and marching. Easily the creepiest piece on the disc.

An excellent album of dark, often serene guitar-based glacial ambient drift, and one of my favorite Desolation House releases.