DWARR

I would never claim to be a metal expert but every once in a while I stumble upon artists like Dwarr. In my mind, Duane Warr (DWARR was his recording moniker) is to metal what Bob Desper and Bill Clint are to folk. Downer, loner, outsider, doom, whatever appellation you want to tag on to the music. There is something unsettling, singular, and very memorable about DWARR's handful of recordings from the early and mid eighties.
Duane Warr lived in Columbia, South Carolina and recorded two albums, "Starting Over" and "Animals" largely by himself. "Starting Over" was self-released in 1984, "Animals" came some time later, and now the records are supremely rare finds, fetching hundreds of dollars. The music is menacing like Sabbath but with a fragile edge (which I guess Sabbath always had as well) that belies the "outsider/DIY" quality of it. The muddy production and washed out chorus effects only add to the bizarre meta-warp of Warr's records; whether this was intentional or not, as with all so called "real people" albums, is up to debate.
Apparently Warr became a born again Christian and destroyed most of the remaining copies of his records, along with the master tapes, thus sealing his music in the impossible canon that keeps dorks like me crate digging all the time. This is pretty desolate stuff though, and if I didn't know that Warr had gone on to a rather benign post metal existence, I think his music would be even that much more surreal.
The video below was made by Warr and his brother, presumably in the mid eighties. The track is off of his first record, "Starting Over". I would love to find more tracks off this particular album; while "Animals" has a more cohesive hard psych/buzzsaw drone and plod, "Starting Over" is barely what you could call a proper metal record, with this kind of eerie twilight fatigue to it.