Sargent House – 2nd August 2019
Christopher Nosnibor
Confession: when I saw Russian Circles in Leeds a few years ago, I almost fell asleep. Mid-set. Standing up. Near the front. Yes, I’d had some beer – but not that much. Yes, I was tired – but not that tired. More than anything, I was so immersed in the sound I found myself briefly free from the shackles of the everyday and was carried away to a place I rarely go even at home – a place of relaxation, of almost complete release. I was embarrassed, but the embarrassment was countered by a sense of elation and a rare bliss.
The press release states that with Blood Year, Russian Circles offer up the most direct and forceful collection of songs in their discography’. And it’s actually true: Blood Year has force, alright, but also feel particularly cogent and tight. The production conveys the immediacy of a live show, pushing some weighty riff noise right up to the fore, but without losing any texture or detail.
The title track is little more than a two-minute introduction, a gently scaling post-rock palette-teaser that drifts in serenely and its mellow grace only renders the massive driving crunch of ‘Arluck’ more impactful. It’s got some serious heft, the chords are beefy as they come.
Piling directly into another six-and-a-half-minute epic in the form of ‘Milano’, the band go for goth-influenced dramatics and something more atmospheric, while continuing to mine a seam of heavy.
It’s a lugubrious bass that dominates on ‘Kohkia’, the reverby, chorus-soaked guitar again affecting a certain gothy-post punk vibe but against a rhythm section that’s more Shellac than Sisters of Mercy. There’s air between the chords, between each thumping beat, and the spacious production gives room for each instrument to create its own essential position. The feel is expansive, like looking across valleys and a full mountain range from an isolated summit, and in conjuring this experience, it’s transportative and uplifting, life-affirming, although this is of course simply the contents of my head interacting with the conglomeration of sounds. This is how all art reception works, and it’s noteworthy that reception theory, emerging from the work of Hans-Robert Jauss in the late 60s and carried forward by Stewart Hall in he 70s and 80s, has yet to be superseded. And so the short version is that the most I can possibly aim to share here is a report on my personal decoding of the coding that is Blood Year: however hard I may strive for impartial objectivity, there is no escaping that there is an underlying subjective response to art in any given medium.
After the brief interlude that is ‘Ghost on High’, the seven-and-a-half-minute ‘Sinaia’ again brings heavy-riffing sonic enormity and a sense of swelling grandeur. And I’m still very much awake here.
AA
