Little Skull - Untitled

The second missive from Horn of Plenty this week sees them go back to the start with a first time vinyl press of Little Skull's 2009 debut long player, originally issued as a CDr on the also-great Students of Decay. With just 100 copies of that CDr pressed, i don't suppose many will have heard this before now, a fate that seems fitting of this rather opaque and spectral music. Written, performed and recorded by Dean Brown in Wellington using a range of homemade - and otherwise - instruments, Untitled's 13 tracks manage to harness the abstruse powers of the late 90s New Zealand underground in both form and feel. Drone, folk song and noise sprawl coalesce into uncatchable shapes, at once the flickering light and the moth it ensnares, something like a combination of a downhome Dead C or Birchville Cat Motel, Surface of the Earth and Pumice. Like those other great Kiwi acts, Brown's music plays with contrasts, first elusive and arcane, then suddenly magnetic and alluring - the tracklisting almost seems to adhere to this binary in an A/B sequence, one track pushes, the next pulls and so forth. The effect is all to the good, placing Little Skull a little out of reach, caught in their own purgatorial zone, much like the ghostly female image caught behind crushed translucent paper on the record's cover.