1. Time (3.06)
2. Nostalgia (3.19)
3. Destroy Your Life (3.56)
4. Underneath Stars without a Sky (3.11)
5. First Song (3.35)
6. Shine (2.08)
7. And Never Return (3.15)
8. Shores of Yesterday (3.01)
9. Up the Ass of a Swan (7.27)
10. In June, as I Killed Time (3.56)
11. A Dream Within a Dream (4.21)
12. I Woke From a Dream that Lasted all of My Life (4.15)
13. Black (4.02)
14. Time (duet with RN Taylor of Changes) (3.10)

I am still the same… but people change

The acoustic music of Cadaverous Condition lures you outside with snow-covered tales nearby the coasts of Skaggerak in Denmark of the north, to the isles of Orkney and the moorland grave of young Betty Corrigal of 16 years, callously buried outside the parish boundaries for committing suicide. The hoary croaks of Cadaverous Condition evoke distant memories of dusky elves, nissen and tomera, of foster fathers who drowned their tomcat daughters and then did steal back to the sea whence they’d once upon a time come a‑struggling in a net 40 years since. Cadaverous Condition in this acoustic state sing always of time and question the passing of time, like damned musicians. But what renders the acoustic music of Cadaverous Condition so complete is the manner in which they retain the Lord of the Undead Cookie Monster vocals even throughout their acoustic song. This will be recognised as their singularly most genius prank. For the bull-roarer in the tongue of Ur-growler Wolfgang is summat to behold. My preliminary steps with the ensemble were not promising. Indeed, when I first came upon a Cadaverous Condition album, it was mostly because I was intrigued by the idea of a black metal band that had in the past collaborated with Bill Drummond and covered songs by Oasis and Bonnie Prince Billy. I was nevertheless at first hearing underwhelmed by the James Gang-leanness of their music. It was too generic for me to reach. For despite their dedication to travelling and the rediscovery of ancient sites, the band’s regular music practised a very urban paganism, of the cities and the highways, early Alice Cooper-like, hitherto their acoustic side, they sounded like they most certainly never hung in places more rural that a city graveyard. I was halfway through this barrage of generic black metal riffage and about to press reject when an acoustic song burst forth from within the stereo and CC’s frontman and Ur-growler Wolfgang Weiss found himself suddenly not in the dark streets of Vienna, but out in the rural Austrian woodlands. His solitary dead-man song howled across icy wastes to me, as the lonesome bellow monkey Kan Mikami, during a JA Caesar rock opera, for Wolfgang was now the troll beneath the bridge, or the vagabond ‘that hardly step beyond the local ways’, watching time passing, gazing at the canopy of the stars forever out of time. From shapeless refusal, nay casual dismissal to total engrossment I was sent in the course of that single song. I searched out all the Cadaverous Condition records I could locate and, sure enough, each disc contained another precious stone, which I’d load up with subjugation and wail out to heads such as Holy McGrail and Stephen O’Malley. Yes, at a specific time on each album, Cadaverous Condition would always temporarily abandon their electric world of dark entries and Nosferatu shadows, heading out on to the Downs and treading in their ancestral past. For me, Cadaverous Condition’s decision to take their music out into this rural setting was brave in the extreme, for the loss of wattage and distortion from one’s sonic arsenal. And once I gathered the entire canon of Cadaverous Condition records together, the compilation of acoustic songs excavated and extracted from within blithely unfolded before me like some strange Underworld Broadway stage show and I was determined to put the collection out on our mid-price label Fuck Off & Di. When I’d formulated a plan, I asked deadpan-with-a-bedpan lead growler ‘Wer’ Wolfgang Weiss to sequence the songs as he wished and this Album of the Month is the result. Next, Wolfgang asked us to sell the record for £6.99 to get more heads into it. And so, ladies and gentlemen, brothers’n’sisters, we present this Cadaverous Condition as a full psilocybin stumble through your local heaths. Please allow its slowness to increase the fullness around you.