Like a minor satellite spinning silently in space, Grave Speaker, a one-man-doom-band from the US, acts like a witness to all the music that has gone before, is now, and will be. A lazy-eyed sentinel guarding the eternal verities of the the music we all love so much, sworn to keep it’s flame alive at that one fixed point whilst all around is churn, torment and chaos.

In this way, everything on Rays of the Emerald Sun operates completely in it’s own, self-contained, alpha/omega orbit. Whilst clearly the late sixties/early seventies are a big reference point, Sword of Life, you might imagine, could have been heard thundering out of a small Southern chapel in the early twentieth century. Minus the crushing rifferama, obviously.

It’s dated, for sure, but it doesn’t matter because the music here is so pure, and so unreliant on whatever else is happening in the moment you hear it that time actually doesn’t matter. Turn up the title track loud enough, switch the lights off, and it BECOMES your universe. And you become subsumed into it.

This is music that at times gets as close to religion as a modern, rational mind might allow it to; not religion as a throwing-bibles-at-the-heads of the front row exercise in gimmick, but the sort of religion that puts the listener at one not only with the inner workings of the self, but also with how that self connects with what is going on around it. This is where the volume comes in, that moment of surrender under the certainty of oblivion, that moment of sublime congress with the elemental pulses of forever. It is mighty, and it is minute, glorious and meek. It is life itself.

Not much music exists purely for itself and expects to attract others, and yet the music of Grave Speaker is utterly irresistible in it’s ability to construct the simple notes of the scale to mould new horizons and allow insight into what pure artistry, unfettered by the lust for success can achieve. I salute it’s maker, and commend it’s innermost secrets to any and all that would take sacramant with the six strings that make it.

Rays of the Emerald Son is out now.