ALBUM REVIEW: The Breedling – A Straunge & Terrible Wunder

Wrong Speed

Out now

People who follow The Breedling (aka Chris Spalton) will know he is deeply immersed in the landscape and folklore of his native East Anglia. His Insta is a stream of striking images – ruined churches, desolate beaches, haunted trees – and all his work is similarly full of the alarming, the uncanny and the wyrd. He’s a born storyteller, working in images, words, film and – sometimes – music. And here’s his third album (all released by the inestimable Wrong Speed Records), A Straunge & Terrible Wunder. It concerns Black Shuck, something of a folk horror superstar, especially around East Anglia. Accounts of this ‘devil dog’, this ‘horrible shaped thing’ date back to at least the sixteenth century, and it has reared its savage head frequently since then, gaining enough notoriety in the Fens and beyond to even lend its name to a terrible Darkness song.

The Breedling has immersed himself in Black Shuck folklore and history and created an album genuinely dripping in clammy dread, a forty-minute soundscape that drags you deep into the Fens and leaves you there. Split across two sides (of gorgeously splattered vinyl), the first – ORIGIN – examines the 1577 events that spread Black Shuck’s name, while the second – UNDYING – looks at its malign and unheimlich presence since. For an instrumental album, it sure tells one hell of a story, using lurching beats, sheets of harsh noise, creeping sonics and cursed washes of alarm to disorientate, derange and disturb. I guess Nurse With Wound are a valid comparison, although this goes harder than most NWW releases, but there’s also a sound world that calls to mind the blackest metal, the most dread-filled industrial noise, and mutant beats that could almost be Kevin Martin at his most insane. This is draining, exhausting stuff, and that’s both a compliment and a drawback: this isn’t music to soundtrack cooking your Sunday roast or a long walk by the river. This is music to strap on your headphones, grit your teeth and emerge spent and anxious at the end.