Roads to Judah

This is the first album by the San Francisco five-piece. It was recorded in four days between December 2010 and January 2011 and Deathwish Inc. released it on 26 April 2011. It is also the only studio record with guitarist Nick Bassett, who left in 2012 to give his full time to the shoegaze project Whirr. The title comes from the N Judah, one of the busiest lines on San Francisco's transit system, and the words are about George Clarke's substance abuse. Four songs come to under forty minutes, and the method is to keep the shrieking buried far back while a beautiful melody is drawn out at length. Jack Shirley produced, engineered, mixed and mastered it. Kerry McCoy's guitar builds the frame of each piece and Trevor Deschryver's drums switch between blast beats and stillness. The reviews were good. Shane Mehling of Decibel gave it eight out of ten and wrote that it pushed at the boundaries of black metal, while Alex Deller of Rock Sound stopped at six, saying the combination of black metal and shoegaze was not new in itself and comparing the record to Liturgy. The Japanese edition (DYMC-149) adds the four songs of the Libertine Dissolves EP for eight in all.