Aural Aggravation

Neurot Recordings – 23rd September 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

This is not an album to take lightly, or one that can be absorbed in a single listening session. In fact, this review has taken the best part of a fortnight to assemble, because there’s a lot to process, a lot to chew on, and a lot to digest. Neurosis always take their time, and have never been a band to go for the instant hook, and Fires Within Fires is a slow-burning monster. The fact that they’re heralding this as the album which has been three decades in the making makes it clear that this is the album the band feel they’ve spent their entire careers building up to, the culmination of everything they’ve done, the apogee of their creative achievements. It’s an immense expectation to set for any band, but Neurosis are one of the few acts who can genuinely claim to have broken new ground in the metal genre. They’ve not only broken ground in huge clods, but ploughed a singular furrow as deep as the Grand Canyon.

So, Fires Within Fires. It may only contain five tracks, but it’s big. Weighty, hefty, and still forty minutes in duration despite the short track listing. And for all that, it may also fall short of expectation. It’s not a bad album, of course it isn’t. It’s a Neurosis album. Neurosis don’t make bad albums, or weak albums. But herein lies the issue. For the entirety of their career, Neurosis have forged a solitary path of sounding like Neurosis. But needless to say, they’ve also spawned countless imitators. Some of those imitators have now caught up. The slow-burning, organic, subterranean rage has become something of a leitmotif within the domain of progressive metal. But Fires Within Fires lacks the vital signs of progress.

When the volume – and the vocals – crash in, four minutes into opener ‘Bending Light’ it’s nothing short of devastating. But the rest of the album fails to really capitalise, and there’s very much as sense that despite the promise of Fires Within Fires being an album ‘three decades in the making’ and ‘a testament both to the history and future of Neurosis’, it’s a rather safe, and ultimately formulaic work. The tracks are overly long and don’t really go anywhere. The lengthy quiet passages don’t really build anticipation for the bursts of noise, which aren’t as explosive as perhaps they could, or should be, and it feels like they’re simply treading water and content to coast with a Neurosis-by-numbers set. The heavy grain that makes the best of Neurosis isn’t conveyed in the production, either as they plod through some sludgy riffs.

Fires Within Fires still drubs the majority of albums released in any genre this year so far, as a Neurosis album always will. But it is really quite dull in places, and is, particularly by their own standards, predictable, and consequently, it fails to engage. There’s an absence of frisson, of real rage, of real fire at the heart of it all. Sad as it is to say, ‘three decades in the making’ effectively translates as ‘three decades honing the template’.