Biography
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Years Active
1998 – 2000 (2 years)
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Members
- Bill Skibbe
- Jessica Ruffins
- Mario Rubalcaba
This is one of the more obscure albums on the legendary San Diego hardcore label Gravity, but fans of Earthless (which there appear to be many of, from the number of Earthless records we've been selling over the past few months) will probably want to check this record out, as Sea Of Tombs features Earthless drummer Mario Rubalcaba (also of Clikatat Ikatowi and Rocket From The Crypt) and delivers a similiar but more primitive version of heavy, sludgy acid-rock.
After he moved to Chicago from San Diego in the late 90's, Rubalcaba formed Sea Of Tombs with Bill Skibble and Jessica Ruffins (also of Lake Of Dracula) and recorded this album before heading back to the west coast. The album eventually found a home on Rubalcaba's old label Gravity and came out in 2000. The album is plastered in wickedly shitty hesher artwork like the alien skull on the front cover with a dagger shoved through it, and other drawings of serpents, chalices, and demonic figures all rendered in thick strokes of a magic marker, and it ties in with the thoroughly stoned, low-fi psych jamming etched on the record.
The recording is pretty low-fi, but it fits Sea Of Tombs's gooey garage atmosphere, as each of the untitled jams sprawls out at a lethargic pace, the drums laying down a combination of heavy, quasi-motorik beats and way-out improvisation, the guitars blasting off into the stratosphere and unleashing streams of fiery Hendrix style shred and lysergic riffage. Just as Earthless supplant the role of a vocalist with off the wall acid-guitar explorations, Sea Of Tombs get lost in equally far out deep-void jamming, but these songs are heavier and sluggish compared to Earthless, more like a mix of early Sabbath and early Hawkwind.
Raw, murky blues-based heavy rock mutated into a rumbling hypno-trance, glazed with unreal amounts of bass and murky fuzz, usually locked into a plodding propulsive dirge that never speeds up all that much and which contributes to the hypnotic brain-haze that these cats administer. Check this out if yer into the heavy, sludgy psych-drug dirges of Earthless, Mammatus, Dead Meadow, and Ahkmed. Comes with a full color poster and a black and white foldout.
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