Sam Mickens: Slay & Slake

Sam Mickens (The Dead Science, ex-Xiu Xiu, Parenthetical Girls) delivers an offering of eerie, funereal music that really doesn’t go anywhere. It is, at best, self-indulgent angst, all whispers and hushed tones. It’s “dark”, “mysterious”, and shrouded in titles such as “Lord Death Man”, “Witch’s Cauldron”, “At The Mountains of Madness/Ebb Tide”, and so on. To make matters weirder “Grisly Souls” brings in MF Grimm to bust a few rhymes. It’s as improbable as Newt Gingrich replacing Slash in Guns ‘n’ Roses. Or maybe not. Let’s just say it doesn’t do anything to breath life into this already weathered corpse.