Warehouse find of this now quite-hard-to-find 7" from infamous UK post-industrial noise rock / psych guitar / avant-distortion blasters Skullflower when they were more or less at the apex of their amplifier-melting extremism. Release4d back in 1994, this and the Ramleh releases were amongst the most ear-warping underground rock that Sympathy For The Record Industry, a label much better know for its forays into garage rock / punk with major players like Hole, White Stripes, Rocket From The Crypt, Dwarves. This two-song motherfucker came out around the band's Last Shot At Heaven / Carved Into Roses / Transformer period, and stuck out from the grimy, abstract look of their other releases with a now-legendary sleeve art from underground comics legend Larry Welz ( Cherry Poptart). For the longest time, Ponyland was one of my most sought-after Skullflower releases. Before stumbling onto this stash, I'd never been able to locate it. It features the Matthew Bower / Stuart Dennison lineup with Russel Smith of Terminal Cheesecake on guitar, and drops the caveman psych hammer.

Two bulky tunes on here: the A-side title track drops a nearly eight-minute sprawl of pastoral strangeness on your cranium, mysterious animalistic sounds and distant wails flitting in the background of a repetitious, moody, rather pretty guitar figure that ends up exploding into a sledgehammer squall of MEGA-distorted psychedelic sludge rock, that early 90's era sound executed at brutalist levels of blown-out amps and agonized riffs; this alternates between the calm and the storm over the course of the entire song and it's intense. Those howling vocals are indistinguishable from much of the reverb-soaked axe noise, fragments of frayed melody splintering off the song's central two-chord dirge, an array of other effects pedals, fretboard abuse, and wind-tunnel production all colliding in an unholy noise-rock of drugged-out, anvil-thudding heaviosity. One of my favorite jams from this particular era / lineup.

The flipside "Fake Revolt" is far less coherent, going full bore with a mid-paced knuckle dragging garage rock meets Hawkwind meets Melvins-esque hypno-meltdown. Not too far removed from the skull-caving power-psych noise-rock that their pals in Ramleh were doing around the same time, but "Revolt" is so overdriven with effects on both the instruments and the vocals that it turns into a gluey space-rock freak-out tethered only by the thunderous, hammer-of-heaven drumming that blasts through this track. Not as memorable as that title track, but I'm a sucker for anything and all things Skullflower, and this delivers the cacophonic, LSD-soaked chaos in spades.