War Honey‘s guitarist gets, in his own words, ‘weird as shit‘ on this delightfully dense ambient journey.
Release date: January 11, 2026 | Eddie Van Helsing Media | Instagram | Bandcamp | Website | YouTube
There’s a small collection of various Tumblr posts that live rent-free in my head. Here’s one of them, courtesy of user olmtimeguy:
‘Basically once or twice a week, I take a few edibles, turn off all the lights, and shower while on the floor in complete darkness, rolling around in soap. I call this my Olm time after the blind cave salamander. I basically roll around in all the soap and just pretend l’m a little cave dwelling salamander while high as shit, and then rinse off and crawl out of the shower and head to my room. It’s like meditation. I go to a completely different state mentally. This is the only thing that has significantly helped me with stress, while allowing me to incorporate all of my self care duties into my routine. Becoming one with the Olm is my only option.‘
I think about Olm Time a lot. I’ve always been one of those weird girls who was way too into reptiles as a child, but the concept of taking dedicated time to just chill the fuck out the in the bathtub has become pretty integral to my adult life. Part of what makes my personal Olm Time even better than the original is that I usually throw on an ambient project that doens’t sound too much like spa music for some subterranean background tunes, like Magic Sword‘s Badlands. Hail Satan, the newest effort from Ben Fitts of War Honey and released under the moniker Conan the Accountant, fits this vibe perfectly.
Hail Satan is the result of splicing and processing Conan’s recent live performances, including crowd noise, into entirely new compositions. Cool, we’re already doing something kooky. If I was forced to describe the album, or his work in general, in genre terms, my best guess would be somewhere between ambient, glitch, noise, and post-rock, but all underneath the prefix of ‘experimental.’ That doesn’t really do a lot to narrow things down, but Hail Satan isn’t interested in being narrowed down. In Fitts’s own words, Conan the Accountant as a project is about ‘pushing the sound of an electric guitar as far as he can.‘
That is blindingly obvious from the first notes of album opener “Even The Devil Wants My Autograph”; I don’t think a casual listener would even realize these noises previously came from a guitar at all. My overall impression of the tracks on Hail Satan is that they feel like radio broadcasts from a both post-apocalyptic and prehistoric world. I thought a lot about space deserts listening to this record, about hearing some sort of cosmic noise, or the echoes of a civilization long gone. Conan seems to have been on a similar train of thought, based on “Spaghetti Western Medicine” and “Alien Abduction Insurance”, which somehow exactly evoke their titles. There’s something deeply voyeuristic about experiencing these songs –almost like they are occuring naturally somewhere that I’m not supposed to really be.
Tracks like “Bob the Barbarian” incorporate heavy glitching that pans between the listener’s ears, reminiscent of dial-up noises. “Misanthropic and Lycanthropic” almost sounds like a distress signal, incorporating garbled vocal clips and whistles (crowd noise, presumably) that have been transformed into something new and forboding as hell. If Oneohtrix Point Never‘s Tranquilizer was the music from a lush and glittering faraway world, Hail Satan is the opposite – dark, dense, harsh, and occasionally encouraging a creeping dread.
It’s not all noise and doom, though. “The Ungrateful Dead” is one of the few pieces on the album that has a discernable melody, and beautiful one at that, expertly played on highly reverbed guitar. This track sticks out both for the instrumentation and the hopeful tone; I can almost imagine this as a song on the Life is Strange soundtrack. “Black Marbled Frosting” leans on a repetitive synth hook that sounds a bit like a Street Fighter theme got a Chopped ‘n Screwed remix. It’s still heavier than the previously mentioned song, but doesn’t quite hit the overwhelming sonic state that the rest of the album does.
Hail Satan is long – like, 17 songs long. That’s a lot. I don’t know if it needed to be this all-encompassing, but frankly, it doesn’t really matter. I bitch a lot about album lengths and have a strong preference for 30 to 45-minute records, but I care much less the further from the mainstream we are. I can confidently say that Conan the Accountant is far from the mainstream indeed, considering that it is entirely instrumental, very out there, and to quote Fitts again, ‘weird as shit.‘ I don’t think accessibility is the goal of a project like this, and it doesn’t have to be.
I do think, however, that you should give this a shot, even if you are unacquainted with bizarro experimental noise-ish stuff. It’s odd, but unequivocally fascinating, especially knowing that you are listening to a re-constituted version of a million little bits of live shows, an aural collage. The individual tracks clip along at a quick enough pace to make Hail Satan feel a bit like scrolling TikTok in Night Vale, but they come together to make a strangely pleasant whole. Please consider this for your next mental regression to the mind of a cave salamander.
