The immense musical parabola of Albin Julius aka Der Blutharsch, a brilliant and controversial artist who perhaps in times past would have been a magnificent classical musician, but today is surely a medium through which music ebbs and flows in the universe, continues. The first phase of his musical life was under the banner of martial neofolk politically aligned in the far right, also collaborating with Death In June. Since 2011 the psychedelic turn, changing his name to Der Blutharsch and The Infinite Church Of The Leading Hand. The musical caesura with the past is almost total, as here we are in the territories of the freest and most visionary psychedelia, for a record that captivates and takes you far away. The turnaround of Albin, who with musicians like Douglas Pearce, deus ex machina of Death In June shares the same extremely contradictory view of the art of life, has not brought him much praise from his past audience, while instead it has gained him new followers among those who love more visionary and ethereal music. Wish I Weren’t Here, besides being a slap in the nuts to Pink Floyd and to all alternative music, is a free and blunt record, something totally untethered from commercial logic, the furthest thing there can be from a comfort zone. Der Blutharsch with his associates wants to hurt, to penetrate the depths of our modernly devastated psyche, to break the levees of the easy, to distort an already distorted reality into an infinite folding in on itself. The sound is disruptive, the female voice is that of a shaman that takes us into a regressio ad infinitum, as the group evolves into jams that tend to linger, with all spaces filled and the vacuum that does not exist. Albin’s project advances further and thunderously, if one reads it musically this record is one of the best things that has come out lately in the psychedelic field and beyond, for there are strong elements of new wave and excellent krautrock here. Beyond any other consideration, let’s just let the music do the talking for now, because that is excellent. (M.Argo – MetalEyes 6/4/2019)

Der Blutarsch and The Infinite Church Of The Leading Hand

2019 – Independent