22nd September 2017
Christopher Nosnibor
Upcdownc have been around for a while now: seventeen years, in fact. Their latest offering is an absolute behemoth. I Awake is what you might call a concept album. Back in the heyday of prog, concept albums were all the rage, but fell out of favour with the advent of punk. While albums like Mansun’s Six were hugely out of step at the time, concept albums have slowly become more acceptable. One could reasonably contend that Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral was one of the first truly ‘cool’ concept albums of more recent memory, although David Bowie’s Outside was hardly a an embarrassment either. Anyway, we’re well into the post-Oceansize / Amplifier neoprog era now, and the concept album is finally no longer considered embarrassing or synonymous with ‘four sides of self-indulgent wank featuring extended keyboard solos and fifteen-minute guitar breaks.’
I, Awake is in fact unashamedly conceptual, as the press release suggests when it explains: ‘The concept behind the music and artwork is based on the idea of sleep, dreams, nightmares and fears coupled with extreme anxiety and night terrors. I, Awake explores the transitions between sleep and waking life.’
As an almost lifelong insomniac, I’ve experienced on numerous and protracted occasions uncomfortable and disorientating, paranoia-inducing intersections between the two states. At a certain point, wakefulness and sleep blur into one, and both can be equally terrifying. From aural hallucinations to general feelings of disconnection, by route of the weird way disturbing dreams can cling for days and hit with the emotional impact of real, live experiences, the ways sleep / not sleep and all of the phases in between can affect a person are manifold.
I, Awake is a detailed, measured and dynamic album which, remarkably, conveys all of this. The album’s seventeen tracks are arranged as essentially six movements, each segmented into parts, with the exception of the final piece, ‘The Black Dracula’, which stands alone as a single part movement – although it does have a running time which extends beyond the fifteen-minute mark.
To begin with, it’s a fairly sedate and delicately-arranged affair. It’s on the fourth part of the first movement, ‘Am I Awake?’ that the dense bass sludge really hits in a tsunami and the band lock into an obliterative, throbbing groove.
‘Awake’ transitions through chiming passages, with part 2 manifesting as a gentle, rippling swell of chorus-soaked guitar that’s pure post-rock, before part four erupts – for a whole minute and two seconds – into a driving, uptempo grunge riff-out.
‘Adrift’ builds in an almost Swans-like manner through heavy repetition and gradual layering to a slowly unfurling bloom before finally breaking into a tearing, overloading, sludge-heavy riff which thunders with bowel-shaking weight through the six-minute third part.
‘Looming’ and ‘Foreboding’ (each in two parts) are comparatively brief and feel like bridging segments which pave the way for the epic finale. And epic is the word. Over the course of its sprawling fifteen-minute expanse, ‘The Black Dracula’ transitions between the delicately mesmeric to the explosive. It’s all about the build, of course and here, it builds for nigh on an eternity by route of a mid-section where a mid-tempo riffcentric trudge takes the centre stage.
As the dying moments are occupied by samples, the listener is left to digest the full picture of the depth, range and implications of I, Awake. It’s not an immediate or direct album, and nor does it need to be: I, Awake is challenging and lures the listener into that difficult zone.
Aural Aggravation 