Monolith Cocktail Blog

LP  REVIEW

Waiting until the bones had been well and truly sucked dry from the new and much anticipated Grumbling Fur album, Preternaturals, by the usual camarilla of music press, we have handed over the duty of reviewing this, as it happens, much entrancing cerebral Eno-esque triumph, to our literary voice, Ayfer Simms. 

Not so much a critique as setting the mood,  Ayfer responds with an all out lyrical purview; reaching back across both time and space. 

Grumbling Fur ‘Preternaturals’   (The Quietus Phonographic Corporation)

Once upon a time, Grumbling Fur.

Once upon a time we were none, once upon a time we were dancing in chaos in the midst of a fuzzy dream. We were little cells, spasmodic, flickering as in an irresistible compulsion to assemble and become more.

Once upon a time we were men, we crumbled and we took shape, we broke and we stood. Grumbling Fur’s album begins with voices from a cinema set that are about to shoot: A sort of genesis for its own world, a mise en scene that opens a door for us: we settle and prepare to watch, to witness the show of humanity, protected by the amiable voices of the Grumbling fur men who bring in touches of appeasing chanting.
Grumbling fur fuses cultures and ages using the scent of the mystical temples in India, the tinkles of the deep oceans, the thunder’s magnetic clash on earth as the planet calms down after a cosmic birth,  thunder falls on the calm and immense masses of gas as they dissipate to let the earth shell solidify unknowingly for our sake.

Grumbling fur is the tribal union of men crossing history, from the spark of life to the ancestral figures dancing in the collective conscience, it is all the things that gathered from nothingness, mingled in time with sometimes harsh or commendable experiences. Grumbling fur sets up the theatre of men’s evolution. Their sound is the sever gaze of man resigned in their efforts as they work the land and the iron, the face of the worker of the industrial age, the miner, the black smith, the farmer turning the earth in the vast lands, is the industrial fist of men, the cell under the water accidentally  playing harmonious sounds.

Grumbling Fur is a gathering of Men under a vault, there’s the whizzing of a boiling kettle from the 50s, a door slamming on a windy day, a house in the middle of Siberia hurling and cracking while the cold chill brings in a frozen blizzard. A solid man hits a heavy iron hammer to build the tools of survival, he is cold but has no choice, nor is he complaining. This is the way of life, to build the human chain of evolution against the elements.

Grumbling fur is Asia worshipping a perfect god with bulging eyes and horns, the church men carrying their god in their hearts, the monks copying manuscripts in the heights of a deserted mountain, the labourers, the poor’s, the genius, the apes, the tools, the elements, our consciousness.

Grumbling fur’s heart is pure: “I have seen things you would not believe”. They have witnessed, they have ingested and given back their own vision of us, assembling the history of humanity, from the beginning of things to our present conception of the future. Once upon a time we were none, but Grumbling Fur has reignited our past with their own captivating sounds.