Ripcord Records – 8th November 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
Codespeaker are a post-metal band from Edinburgh, which their press release describes as ‘Scotland’s sombre capital’. Of all things, I’d never really considered it to be a sombre place, and I’ve been a fair few times – then again, having lived in Glasgow for four years, I am aware of just how bleak the long Scottish winters are. Further north by latitude than Moscow and separated from the Arctic Ocean by only more water, things can be pretty grim and the nights can feel like weeks.
They promise an ‘atmospheric, dark, and heavy post-metal sound’ with ‘thunderous drums and colossal guitars reminiscent of titanic bands like Neurosis and Cult of Luna’, on an album which ‘marks a new chapter for Codespeaker… [a] massive-sounding record [which] offers a towering and immersive experience, ebbing and flowing between hypnotic, mammoth-sized riffs and intense vocals, while also embracing atmospheric and contemplative moments.’
Having had no television for three months after a storm took down the aerial during my time in Glasgow, again, this does seem to represent the bleakness of those long, long nights which seem to stretch from 2pm to 9:30am, as well as articulating the state of the world right now. It’s at war. It’s on fire. It’s fucked up. It’s scary. Scavenger picks it way through the fragments and scraps, the mess of confusion and roars to the sky, an unbridled utterance of raw anguish.
They’re straight in with the thunder on the first song, the six-minute ‘Usud’ and the weight only grows on the roaring blast that is ‘Signum’. The drums are half-submerged by the thick wall of overdriven guitar when they’re in full-on riff mode, and the force is something else, a sonic tsunami. When they break it down to quieter passages, it feels like a lull in a storm, but more than that, they reveal an altogether more reflective aspect, and while they do so, they brood hard and their knack for introspective atmospherics is matched by their technical skills – both the musicianship and composition is deft. And they prove themselves to be masters of the build-up, too: to continue with the storm analogy, the mid-section of ‘Recission’ is exemplary, as if the winds gradually begin to build before suddenly, bam! You’re hit by a torrential downpour driven by a ninety-mile-per-hour gust. The beginning of ‘Karst’ again shows that they’re capable of moments of magnificent poise and calm, before gradually building… and building… it’s a while before they let fly with all the riffs, all the pedals, all the volume, and the impact is devastating.
Instrumentally, ‘Hetacomb’ calls to mind segments of Amenra’s Mass VI, the soft picking giving way to a bone-crunching chug, while ‘Samsa’, the album’s shortest track, coming n at under four minutes, is also perhaps the most brutal. ‘Enso’ sprawls over almost seven minutes of blistering savagery, an exorcism of pain and a tempest of catharsis. They’ve got yet more up their collective sleeves: the final track, ‘Verte’ is a work of magnificent, alternating dreamy shoegaze segments, with volcanic metal eruptions which hit with a bowel-quaking force.
All told, Scavenger is pretty special – equally emotive and high impact, this is intelligent, articulate, and monumentally heavy. I suppose you might say it’s the perfect equilibrium between deft and heft.
AA
Aural Aggravation 