Eloian Empire: We’ve Got Fiends in Low Places

[Cue old codger cadence]: Back in my day, making mix tapes was sacred: you’d sit for painstaking hours, days, weeks, years perfecting song selection, then you’d walk ten miles up a hill in the snow to school to deliver the goods to a special someone. Now-a-days, the myriad of mixes and comps coming out sound like the carrion of an aural dump—a mismatched kaleidoscope of tunes thrown together without any consideration for arrangement or sentiment. On occasion, however, I’ll come across a comp that harkens back to the good ole days and present a truly masterful mix: this time around, it’s the elusive Eolian Empire and their We’ve Got Fiends in Low Places. The Portland-based Eolian collective is notoriously exclusive, having only released material from their local segment of heavy, noisy, and “weird” acts. This time around, however, the reclusive record label put out this “Heavy Vibes Internationale” compilation, which presents the best in all things lowly, sludgy, and heavy from acts from around the globe.

The raucous ensembles featured on the compilation comprise Eolian’s thirteenth release, but the record in no way sounds like an old-hat trick—the arrangement and selection is straight-up salient—like someone sat for a few hours in the cold dead of night, and with painstaking attention to detail, hung on to sentiment, took a six-mile trek up to Eolian Empire, and delivered this pretty phenomenal aural relic.