Burial Tree – The Power of Myth
Courtesy of The Metallist PR
(Subcontinental Records)
Release Date: August 1, 2025
Monte Cimino
Some records creep into the room like an omen. The Power of Myth, the latest resurrection of Monte Cimino’s Burial Tree, doesn’t wait for permission — it coils around you, slow and deliberate, until you’re breathing in its smoke. Across three sprawling pieces, it fuses heavy post-rock, free jazz chaos, and sludge-drenched weight into a sound that feels at once ancient, cinematic, and slightly dangerous.
Bill Laswell
Cimino has always had a knack for gathering the right conspirators, but this time the roster borders on mythical itself. Bass icon Bill Laswell brings his inimitable low-end gravitas; Peter Apfelbaum’s avant-garde saxophone howls like it’s been summoned from the wrong side of the veil; Adam McClure drives the beat with a jazz-meets-hardcore pulse; and then there’s Dave Lombardo — yes, that Dave Lombardo — delivering percussive assaults and strange electronic murmurs that would make even the most jaded metalhead’s hair stand on end.
“Sigils” opens the record like a dark ritual. It’s sprawling, cinematic, and slow-burning — the kind of piece that could score a film about gods clawing their way back into the modern world. There’s no rush here; instead, riffs emerge from shadow and dissolve into ambient haze, drawing you into an altered state before you even realize it’s happening.
Peter Apfelbaum
“Veve” is where things truly get strange — and glorious. The drum track is pure Bay Area metal swagger, but buried under something far sludgier, more sinister… as if it’s sliding, slowly, inexorably, straight into Hell. Apfelbaum’s saxophone isn’t a mere embellishment; it’s an unhinged character of its own, creeping, shrieking, and bending the song into terrifying beauty. There’s a hallucinatory quality here — changes in pace, textures unraveling, shadows stretching — that makes it perfect for headphone isolation or, for those inclined, a smoke-fueled journey through your own headspace.
The title track stretches to fifteen minutes and abandons rhythm altogether. It opens with desert-wind soundscapes that drift for nearly the length of an entire conventional song before the bass swells in. It’s a drone, a trance, a slow ride on a flying black bus through the Sixties’ darkest countercultural backroads — the kind where Charles Manson’s ghost might just lean over and start explaining the cosmos to you. There’s no verse-chorus safety net, just a steadily deepening mind trip that rewards surrender.
Taken as a whole, The Power of Myth is less an album than an experience — a patient, immersive headspace built from players who’ve spent lifetimes pushing the boundaries of genre. It’s the soundtrack for society’s unraveling, for dreamers who prefer the shadows, for artists who understand that beauty and dread are often two sides of the same coin.
Listen to The Power of Myth:
