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Algiers

by Thou

supported by
adammcjohnson
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adammcjohnson Best Thou compilation album in my opinion. Very impressive how many uniquely great songs they crammed into this one Favorite track: Voices in the Wilderness.
ruairimusic
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ruairimusic hhhmmmm hhhh hhhmm hh Favorite track: Pill.
Jordan Vauvert
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Jordan Vauvert Énorme compilation de la part de Thou, et l'adjectif "énorme" ne s'applique pas qu'à la durée gargantuesque de cet album (quasiment 1h45, accrochez-vous bien). Algiers est écrasant, du genre à vous écrabouiller sans ménagement, à vous enfoncer plus bas que terre, à vous priver d'oxygène. La vocation de Thou est claire : créer un son à la fois rythmé, dans toute la gloire du doom, et très sale.

La Terre est peut-être ronde pour qu'on doive se la traîner comme un prisonnier traîne son boulet. Favorite track: Voices in the Wilderness.
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1.
Decadence is restrained and smothered by the strictest codes of conduct. And you'll writhe naked upon the sands as the sun flays every inch of skin which is then assaulted and hacked away by the scorching, barren wind of empty breath. You wail and pray and grovel on your knees for a drop of water, just a bit of substance. Instead, you must sustain yourself on the scraps of idleness, or gorge yourself on the incessant corruption and muck of indifference. Excessiveness is a virtue. Debasement is a virtue. This is the birthplace of Saint I-Don't-Care. The patron saint of extravagant waste and crippling depression. Enjoy the masquerade of dark, bitter smiles of those too senseless to notice the uncanny resemblance: uptight aristocrat, lackadaisical vagabond. Different uniforms for the same subservient fuck.
2.
3.
Pill 03:01
Vacant eyes meet vacant eyes meet vacant eyes meet vacant eyes. Can there be more? There must be more. Reach inside. Deep inside. Fingers run over the lying tongue, down the throat, probing deeper and deeper and deeper. Grasp the writhing truth. Purged. Insubstantial blame. Purged. Inconsequential anger. Purposeless discourse. And now a promise of benevolent malice. A promise of impending violence to you, my friend. This is a promise to you, my friend.
4.
Eulogy 05:08
Drink deep of your mortality. Accept the blueprint for non-achievement, the well-tread path of capitulation. Bury the suffering and ecstasies. When will the old gods be avenged? Extol a life of compromise. Resigned to quiet submission. When will the old gods be avenged? Welcome boredom and banal normality. Farewell to joy and laughter and trust. Welcome fear, suspicion, and hatred. There is the stench of the gathering of flies. You have the look of a strangled child. You have the look of a hollow shell. You have the look of a rotting corpse. Entombed under intolerable weight, in the delusions of wish fulfillment. Escape the standards of youth. Find sanctuary in a cringing half-life. It's called moving on. It's called growing up. It's called giving up. Lurking in the shadow of your past, lurking in the blackness of acquiescence, pathetic acceptance.
5.
Get Me Out 01:23
One more second fucking wasted, put this bullet in my brain. One more second, one more minute, one more hour--I'm a wreck. If one more second goes uncounted, put this rope around my neck. Bury myself into the bottle. Cough up glass for a week. Searching for strength in a liquid that takes the death grip on me.
6.
Fiery spires raised to pierce the veil of hermetic, nourishing night. Concrete standards to proclaim the tyranny of industry's might. The heralds that announce the imminence of cancerous disease, unending plague. Nauseous. The bodies piled high. Maggots rule and birth swarms of flies. The black cloud descends. And gold is all. And we welcome thee with open arms, with blinded eyes. Hail, our corporate overlords. Hail, self destructive greed. Hail, our burial grounds.
7.
Strangled in a vice grip. Lash out. This is the place where sadness breeds, the desolation in everyone. This is a wasteland full of nameless, faceless, soulless mounds of flesh, mewling, writhing in and out of existence. Long for communion. Nothing. The wailing moans, the gnashing of teeth. The deafening, endless, complete isolation. Long for an end, a day of reckoning. Into my bones, let it descend. The holy stones lay scattered at the head of every street. Urban scars wiped clean
8.
Millstone 04:58
Chattering, nagging, Black Speech, incessant, irrelevant, irrational. Pettiness always on your tongue. Your fetid breath crawling down the back of my neck. Your cold, dead hands clutching, crushing my soul. My needs, my desires cats paw to your whims. And when you've finally, painfully excised every last ounce of my patience, all the doors will be opened, and I will be resolved--I will be absolved--to leave the curse behind.
9.
Gaze into the empty eyes of the rank and file, and you will know defeat. Knees break, bent before the altar of indifference, of conformity. Lips purse, to kiss upon the ring of submission, of abdication. Servitude personified. Mediocrity's champions. Is this life?
10.
Into the dark night of the soul: emotional balance restored; self-limiting beliefs forsaken; cultivate the Shadow Self; spirituality made visceral. We have healed the religious wounds of a stifling upbringing. We have absolved ourselves of shame and guilt. We have communed with our true ancestors. We have raised the Great Crossroads. We now see the third face of God. In defiance of binary gender, we are made whole and surrender to the unity of synchronicity. And in life, outward reflection. The power of resonance. Like vibrates like. Like amplifies like. In true greatness.
11.
Skinwalker 03:46
And at once I realize that the hand I hold is black with corruption, that the gilded rhetoric is a sibilant mantra meant to stifle guilt, that the staunch discipline of tradition is merely the coward's path, and that this descent into compromise is the death of friendship. I've witnessed you slit the throat of the young idealist and impale empathy to the hilt of your sword. You wear a stranger's face. Your eyes hold no recognition. Conceal the vastness of self-betrayal beneath the scientist's cloak, beneath the scholar's mantle, beneath the hedon's frock. Drink the blood of this perverse deception. Escape in inebriation. Bonds consecrated in our most private moments. Loyalty sacrificed in the blaze of denial. My emptiness has built your altar. And I worshipped myself in you forever.
12.
This woman is Athena. This woman is Medusa. No longer the vehicle of her male counterpart, she is armed and militant--yet in no way a reflection of the stolid directness, the frank simplicity, the violent impotence of the masculine savage. Compulsion recast as understanding. Constraint recast as protection. This woman is Goldman. This woman is Constantine. Water poured over thick black lines. Stay here. Breathe here. One shape is no shape. A mist to obscure the lines you've drawn. Stay here. Breathe here. Flow out. Moist breath on hot tissue. Flow out. Breathe here. Flow out.
13.
It's coming for us through the trees. This is a message from the River. This is a sermon from Nature. To see us weep and moan, to see us float or drown. This is a blighted land, infected with the virus of human greed, corruption chokes every breath as we exalt the culture of excess. Inhaled to the depths of our oaken roots. Exhaled as billowing refinery pollution. Indifference subsists in our bones. This is our unspoken history, a bestial temperament obscured by social constraints. And that brief moment when Nature's wrath released us from Modernity's restraints has offered us a glimpse of what boils beneath our skin. But do not confuse causality and cataclysm. This is systemic violence, and we are all guilty. Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets. She'll come back as fire and burn all the liars, leave a blanket of ash on the ground.
14.
The death throes of daylight set the sky ablaze. Silent pyres are heaped with the bodies of the meek. A twilight inferno: prelude to utter blackness, the Erlking's only boon. In the shadow which offers no relief we explore the caverns of thought and pluck stars from the sky, striving. But armour wrought from rhetoric and axes blunt by willful ignorance offer no protection--only shackles and an early demise. Excise guilt. Abolish doubt. Is there no escape from Ahimsa's snare? Natures face be stained red by claw and tooth. But even rusty tools--misshapen and vile--have their uses. There can be no life for the weak.
15.
We're always crying that we want to be free. But when the shadow of danger looms, and when the mob scents fear: we collectively gasp; we shut our eyes; we abandon our convictions; we grovel and crawl before the Great Seal; we prostrate ourselves before the all-seeing eye of the God of Greed and Poverty and Ownership. Ideology abandoned. Culture abolished. Families destroyed. Psychoses intensified. Consumerist freedom! Limbs and organs decimated. Lives ruined. Spread our disease.
16.
Heads shake at self inflicted misfortune. Hands wrung of responsibility. Ears covered from the ringing trumpets of fact. Father created from the black froth swept off the rim of the cauldron of creation. We are maggots, and we are worms writhing in the marshes of refuse. Flee! Flee! Sink to hands and knees. Crawl through the muck, shrunken genitalia beating against bellies and thighs. Wretched, disgusting beasts. That tree which no man knows has been hewn to it's roots and set ablaze. Our faces are bleached in its ashes.
17.
Cold World 05:45
It's a cold world to walk alone in. You need some side to start belonging. There's always open arms in the war. The out crowd is laughing at you. A man with a badge appears, saying, "It's warm. Come inside." Kid, you got no real agendas. All the good you've done been's forgotten. There's always open arms in the war.
18.
There There 04:32
All as if you were alone. Nobody left you, but you're always not better. It's unmistakable. I'm only here for understanding. You better. Hey, there there. You're not the least of us. Don't look at me like a defect. I'm just unlearning. Don't worry. Hey, there there. When in the sharpest hole, look for the rope that isn't burning: start climbing.

about

This is a digital compilation of several EPs and splits: The Sacrifice, Big City (split 12" with Cower), Resurrection Bay (split 7" with Hell), To the Chaos Wizard Youth, A Faire Quarrell (split 7" with Human Intruder), and The Archer and the Owle.

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released November 29, 2013

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Thou Baton Rouge, Louisiana

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