I’ve been flying along with Golden Bats now for about seven years now. Even though I’ve become somewhat acquainted by long distance with Geordie Stafford, the transplanted Australian (now living in Rome) who’s behind the project, I’ve never asked him where that name came from. I think it’s because I’d rather not know, and instead rely on imagination, picturing from the music an immense supernatural beast overhead, fearsome and frightening, a harbinger of doom, capable of blotting out the light, but radiating a chilling yet mesmerizing shine of its own.
In genre terms Golden Bats is a sludge-doom leviathan whose music tends to be titanically heavy, built upon mammoth riffs that are as corrosive as battery acid, but also steeped in a kind of gothic gloom, and so haunting in its laments that it threatens to split the heart even as it’s splintering bone. Capable of emotionally devastating manifestations of grief and pain as well as humongous heaviness, the music has repeatedly hit home with staggering force on multiple levels.
And now we have another new Golden Bats creation, one of the best yet. It’s a new EP with the mystifying name Upstairs Power Skull Cave Protection, and we’re premiering it now on the day of its release. Continue reading »
