Kevin Bronson on August 6th, 2015

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There’s no rest for the … wicked? Nobody does menacing quite like The Icarus Line, and after 15 or so years of gnawing at the underbelly of the L.A. underground, Joe Cardamone and his gang of malevolents show no signs of softening round the edges. This week, the Icarus Line announced that their eighth album, “All Things Under Heaven,” would be out Oct. 2 on their own American Primitive Records. It’s a double-LP that continues the creative surge Cardamone and gang have enjoyed since 2013’s “Slave Vows” and its 2014 companion album “Avowed Slavery.” It features a guest turn from outsider artist Joe Coleman, and another from Warren Ellis (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Grinderman, Dirty Three), who co-wrote the song “Bedlam Blue.” The album, made at Cardamone’s Valley Recording Studio in Burbank, is “a conjuring captured on record,” he says. “The sessions weren’t long but they were fucking intense. From my porch, this is what America sounds like right now; it’s a document of the intangible … the feeling that a lot of people who I come into contact with that just can’t be described right verbally, it needs a sound to complete the thought.” The typically intense new jam “Ride or Die” seems straight from the jaws of hell — it oozes dread for about two minutes and drenches you in foreboding for a few minutes before slowly extinguishing itself at about 4:20 with Cardamone’s dark pronouncements. “Soundscape” feels like such a pretty word until you hear the Icarus Line forge one.

||| Stream: “Ride or Die”