Metal Underground.com

“Flydust,” the second release from Wicked King Wicker, is two nearly 18-minute tracks with an album cover displaying two jack-o-lanterns under flood lights in the darkness of night. Each copy has a hand-drawn design on the inner record sleeve to make them individual. This record sees more noise than its predecessor, and too much of a good thing quickly turns into a bad thing.

The title track brings back the scrape and filter sweep of the band’s sound, reminding me of early works of SPK and Brighter Death Now, with sporadic drum hits and microphone feedback. The song is very heavy on the noise, which is loud above everything else that might make a sound. I found that the layer of noise was too unchanging and un-nuanced to be interesting for long, especially not for a full eighteen minutes.

On the flipside, playing "You Have All Diminished In My Eyes" is not terribly different than “Flydust.” Bits and pieces of guitar, drums, and bleak yells surface occasionally to form the murky drone of white noise. It’s kind of like looking for a needle in the haystack. But again, too much pure noise for too long becomes uninteresting.

Wicked King Wicker’s “Flydust” is a blackened noise record with just too much noise. I thought that my record player was messing up because it had no other instrument’s sounds coming through for minutes at a time. A few more beats and a little less drone could have saved this album.