Another long-gone warehouse find from the Sympathy For The Record Industry vaults, here you get the fifteen-minute 1992 Evel Knievel EP from notorious UK avant-sludge-noise psychedelic amp-crushers Skullflower, with two lengthy tracks performed by the Matthew Bower / Di Franco / Stuart Dennison trio lineup (circa Obsidian Shaking Codex). Like the other 7"s this crew put out through SFTRI, the sexy-chrome sleeve art is by Pablo Savant, from that period when the UK noise rock outfits were playing around with then-underground "pop art" mutations, definitely has that "Sympathy" vibe but looks, er, odd when paired with the rumbling, dose-devouring avant-sludge-rock din that Evel emits at punishing levels of volume and distortion.

The title track makes up the eight-minute A-side, a moody dirge roiling with searing wah-pedal exploration, distant disaffected groans, and waves crashing over waves of distortion and feedback and massive chordal crunch. Like the Ponyland EP, this is the 'Flower in full-on lo-fi psychedelic sludge-rock mode, screaming guitar licks acid-etched into a lava-flow of Hawkwind-meets-Stooges-meets-Melvins drugcrush, intense and raw and heavy, and hypnotic in it's own hideous repetition, ramming thuis one slow-motion riff down your skullpipe with the force of a hundred pneumatic-powered dwarves. "Evel Knievel" remains one of the standout jams from this era of the band for me, not sure if they ever really got any heavier than this (which is even more impressive considering that there is no bass guitar on this, from what I can tell); crank this side up to maximum volume and find yourself surfing on some sort of kosmische mudslide scarred by inadvertent moments of howling, feral beauty. Righteous.

Over on side two, "Teenage Lightning" strips shit down to a drumkit and layered shrieking guitars and blasts off like a more rabid variation of Band Of Susans or late-80s-era Sonic Youth, that art-noise guitar squall rampaging at full speed and force, backed by the squeal and scream of a multitude of amplifiers spewing nonstop atonal chaos and massive chordal drone, without any vocals in sight. They then drop gear into the ultra-blown lysergic drone rock pouring off of "Diamond Bullet" (which would also appear on Codex in altered form), a big gluey glorious mess of malformed tape noise, amp fuckery, and damaged samples pulled off of Apocalypse Now, set to an elephantine backbeat, a wailing terror of violin and chitttering noise and thick hovering drone sprawling in all directions. A truly fucked up and overwhelming slab of UK psych brutality. Choke on it.