Fans of Americana and dark folk might be familiar with the genre’s enfant terrible King Dude. Their unique take on this style has garnered them a large following that has transcended genres and pulled in fans from black metal to Chelsea Wolfe to Wovenhand.

The Dark Red Seed is an experimental folly of their guitar player Tosten Larson. While you will find some references to his main band, the music presented herein is something quite different from what you might have hoped or expected. Last year’s EP, Stands With Death still had some lingering southern gothic, but his proper debut Becomes Awake taps into a whole other vein. In fact, as Larson himself confesses his prime inspirations were the Beatles ground-breaking Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and  No Quarter: Jimmy Page & Robert Plant Unledded. The first few songs pay homage to the psychedelic sounds of the sixties, but as the album progresses, it delves deeper and deeper into Indian spirituality, channeled through a freakish jazz funnel.  Towards the end of the record he is treading more familiar ground, which incidentally also furbishes the most enjoyable songs, in case you don’t care too much for all the Hindu mumbo jumbo.

Ultimately, this has resulted into a bizarre record whose track listing ironically or perhaps purposefully reflects its own conceptual journey from darkness into light as, for my personal experience, getting through the first two thirds of the record proved to be a particularly trying endeavour with the fruits of labour only to be plucked only at its conclusion; the last song even reminiscing The Doors’ timeless classic ‘The End’. Life imitating art or was it the other way around?

Release date: May 18 2018
Label: Prophecy Productions
Tracklist:
1. Dukkha
2. Darker Days
3. Alap
4. Ancient Sunrise
5. The Mouth of God
6. The Destroyer
7. The Void
8. Awakening
9. Sukha
10. Diana And Ouroboros Dance