Few things in music get my attention like the words REMASTER. If a band thinks enough of their music to go back and give it some more love and attention, then I figure I am in for a special treat. And a special treat is exactly what THE HOWLING EYE have delivered with DYING SUN REMASTER (2019). It's 48 minutes minutes of heavy stoner doom metal, mostly instrumental, and pretty much just epic overall.

It's been a while since I listened to the original DYING SUN (2017) and also I wanted to compare it with the new remaster, and ..... oh hell yes! The entire sound is heavier and fuller. I'm on my good headphones so imagine how this is going to sound when I get it going on the big ancient speakers at Happy Hour tonight. I'm not sure if The Howling Eye has any plans for a CD or vinyl but I would pick up both of those if they came out. This remaster deserves nothing less.

And there's more! Because the remaster includes a new track THE HOWLING CAVES that was not on the original album.

And there's EVEN more because they also recorded different versions of the songs! These guys have been busy. Here is DYING SUN REDUX:


I asked the band about this pair of new records based on the original Dying Sun. Here is what The Howling Eye had to say about REDUX:

The story begins in Feb 2018. The nights were long and cold as fuck and we were recording Sonorous at Kongo Studio in a small town near Warsaw. We used to record our parts for most of the day, having only a gas cooker to make our food and a small, jet-engine-like gas heater to get us warm, so in the end of the day we were all dead tired. Usually we would just rest, jam or both, but on one particular night Jacek (our sound engineer) left for Warsaw to see GOLD, a great Dutch band. We got pretty high and I remembered the idea to re-record our first EP, but someone proposed to make it different. I had a country Texas-ranger-like version of Dying Sun in my mind for a while back then. Even earlier we had noticed that the riff from 'Junkhead' sounds kinda similar to 'To, Co Czujesz, To, Co Wiesz', a Polish reggae/dub classic. Thus we decided to re-record the EP, but each song was to be in a different style. We didn't know what to do with 'Dwa Złote', though, so I guess we just wanted to play it faster and it turned out to be a drum and bass song. We only did one take of everything so it's pretty floppy at some places, but I believe it turned out good. 

And about REMASTER:

Hubert proposed the remaster last Autumn. Our first EP was recorded live at Hubert's basement and pre-mixed (all the mics were recorded into one 'sum' track), so basically everything better than that would be an improvement. We decided that there is no point in fooling around, it sounded cheap, dark and rough, so we wanted even more of it. We basically added more bass where we could and compressed the shit out of everything to achieve this roaring kind of sound. We came up with lyrics to 'Dying Sun', so Hubert recorded them and I overdubbed my solos. Hubert also experimented with stacking layers, reverb and delays, so I hope it's as filthy and swampy as it should be. We also came up with this concept of a dualistic EP, which is reflected in the covers. One side of it is happy and chilly, and the other is pure doom.