RAMLEH Night Hair Child 7" VINYL (Sympathy For The Record Industry) 10.99Definitely one of the more obscure Ramleh releases from the early 1990s, this two-song EP from 1995 is kind of an outlier in the Ramleh back catalog as it is. The vivid, vaguely grotesque sleeve art (courtesy of Pablo Savant) seems to aim towards the at-that-point exploding "alternative rock" in the mainstream music industry, though the music here is most certainly not for average ears. Recorded and released the same year as the band's Be Careful What You Wish For album, this is also one of the weirder entries in the Ramleh catalog from this period of time...
I'm guessing that the title track takes its name from the alternate title to Andrea Bianchi (Burial Ground's 1972 horror film aka What the Peeper Saw; the guys in Ramleh are certainly no novices when it comes to vintage Euro-horror. The music? Whistles and squeals and mayhem strays through the atavistic Stooges / Hawkwind / noise rock adulation of "Night Hair Child (Empathy For K.C.)"; this slightly more musical-minded compared to some opf the other sonic barbarism that Ramleh were spewing in the 1990-1995 era, but it's still waaay out there screamin' towards the Kuiper Belt. Spaced-out electronics and dundering punk riffs blasted with some incredibly vibrant drumming that's all over the place, heavy and howling and completely freaked out neo-noise-damaged-psych-thud, working it's way down to a simple two-chord riff that just pounds you straight into the soft earth for awhile. Gloriously fucked up.
But "Dicey Opera" gets into the creepzone with some anguished film dialogue leading you into a greyhaze sonic swamp of buzzing high-voltage electronics, rumbling incoherent sludge, effects-drenched feedback freakouts that shoot straight into the ionosphere. Slower and more abstract, this one does a pretty good job of matching the vibe of Pablo's gnarly apocalyptic sleeve art, freeform nuke-charred psychnoise smeared over monstrous slow-mo aleatory drumming and explorative guitar skree, all of this coalescing into a six-minute long dark and roiling cloud of pre-millennial dread that trails off into the wasteland.