NEW AGE DOOM featuring H.R.

Sometimes, a project sells itself. NEW AGE DOOM have been making strange and fascinating music for several years, whether collaborating with late, great dub guru Lee "Scratch" Perry or simply pursuing their own eclectic vision of experimental heaviness and synapse-oscillating drone evangelism. On "Angels Against Angels", the Vancouver duo join forces with H.R., legendary frontman with BAD BRAINS and a living benchmark for doing things differently. With a plainly stated plan of combining left-field hardcore with the unearthly sonic textures of dub reggae, this could easily have been a predictable exercise in slamming two disparate genres together, but as it unfolds, this album shrugs off the notion that one plus one necessarily equals two. Much more than the sum of its parts, "Angels Against Angels" is a revolutionary sound clash that is strategically designed to destroy your speakers while providing the perfect soundtrack for huffing down inspirational bong hits.

The most important thing to know about this extraordinary record is that it really doesn't sound like anything else. Plenty of bands claim to be doing something original, when the evidence strongly suggests otherwise, but NEW AGE DOOM are unburdened by genre-placating concerns and have a completely liberated mindset when it comes to conjuring new music. Combining that free-thinking approach with H.R.'s iconic, mad-preacher tones the Canadians have arrived at something truly unprecedented here: a hardcore / dub amalgam that owes little to either of its parent genres, and that nurtures something wholly fresh and new from supposedly familiar ingredients. Play it loud enough, and "Angels Against Angels" will completely alter your brain chemistry.

It begins with H.R.'s unmistakable voice intoning some mystic wisdom, before chaos erupts. "Life On The Other Side, Pt.1" is built from bruising, angular hardcore riffs, stripped of traditional guitar noise, but whipped into a monstrous storm of crushing bottom end, squealing brass and hypnotic, aggressively psychedelic, post-everything clangor. Both freeform and focused, NEW AGE DOOM make a fabulous noise, and H.R. sounds instantly gripped by its bizarre, internal flow. "Life On The Other Side, Pt.2" is even more bizarre, as riffs are crumpled together with scattershot percussion and the punk legend's bleary-eyed pronouncements. It is not entirely clear what's going on, and it is unbelievably exciting, particularly when woozy trumpets blare out from the melee, adding a jazzy menace to proceedings.

At this point, both band and vocalist enter the dub zone. "Radio On" is magnificent: a spaced-out, dub reggae mystery tour, beamed from the depths of the cosmos, it places H.R. in the perfect, crusty-eyed environment, wringing every last drop of unearthly bass from it. As far removed as we are from anything resembling traditional hardcore — or traditional reggae, for that matter — it is abundantly clear that the chemistry between NEW AGE DOOM and their creative partner has hit some kind of exquisite pinnacle. This kind of perverse, anti-gravity dub is as heavy as any metal record, and twice as likely to give your brain a cathartic scrub. Similarly, the title track is, on paper, a blistering hardcore punk tune, but nothing about this project is straightforward. Thanks to a production that inverts every sonic standard, these songs have an otherworldly air, and whether it's the psychedelic punk miasma of "One Heart" or the strings 'n' sequencer crescendos of "We're All The Same", everything adheres to the same groundbreaking ethos.

Assuming that listeners will retain their sanity for the full 40-minute experience, "Angels Against Angels" sways and swerves magnificently to the bitter end. "Aethopia Dub" is a near-magical exercise in lysergic bass worship, and the two-part "Amaseganalo" spacewalks even further into the unknowable void, with amorphous, droning strings (courtesy of PUSSY RIOT's Alina Petrova),celestial guitar intrusions, and an overwhelming, climactic onslaught of subterranean beats, claustrophobic guitars, stately brass, and H.R. in full cerebral preacher mode. Utterly original and fiendishly resistant to being pinned down, "Angels Against Angels" may be a one-off, but it is supremely well equipped to become a certified classic. Stick with it. Open your mind to the possibilities. Nobody else is making music like this.