Mortality Tables – 25th September 2025
Bryan Alka’s brief post on Facebook sharing the news of his new release, is revelatory: ‘Today we release my 5th full length on Mortality Tables. After a series of breakdowns… The Magnitude Weighs Heavy.’
The Magnitude Weighs Heavy is the third and final instalment of a of dark and brooding albums, the first two parts of which – The Colour Of Terrible Crystal and Regarding The Auguries – were released by Vince Clarke’s VeryRecords. Alka, and particularly Bryan Michael, has no small back story: ‘a Philadelphia-area artist who has collaborated with Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode / Erasure / Yazoo), Roger O’Donnell (The Cure), Christian Savill (Slowdive / Monster Movie) and Michael Textbeak (Cleopatra Records). alka was formed around 2000 as a return to his bedroom producing days, and as a cleansing of his disappointing experience within the Philadelphia indie rock scene.’
This thirteen-track album is epic, grand, expansive. It’s also an exercise is taut electropop with a decidedly early 80s bent. Because what goes around comes around, the whipcrack snare and noodly electronic drift which defines many of the tracks, despite being pure 1989, have a contemporary feel, too.
‘Soliloquiy’ drifts into dreamy electro shoegaze, mellow and atmospheric, rippling, and soaked with a certain sadness, however sturdy the beats remain. Elsewhere, as on ‘Creeps; its clearly an attempt to lock things down with pinging robotic beats
This feels like quite departure for Mortality Tables, given their learning toward abstraction an ambience, but they’ve always leaned toward the different, and this is a work which is unashamedly different. ‘Unravel’ is exemplary here: it’s got groove, and is ostensibly a bopping dance cut, and a far cry from the implications of the album title. But everyone deals with trauma, grief, and distress differently, and we all articulate our internal strifes by different means. ‘enchanté’ locks into a hypnotic groove, the likes of which I haven’t been so immersed in since I discovered The Dancing Wu Li Masters by 25 Men back in 2008.
For all that, there are large, ambient expanses, passages of stuttering electro which draw together elements of industrial alongside the layered dance beats. The ten-minute ‘an attempt to conjure quiet’ feels like it’s quite willing to delve deeper into noise, the very opposite of the quiet it claims to seek, and the duration of this album feels like a teetering on edge. I’m reminded of how my late wife would hassle an and harangue over details, over chores, and the tense, jittery tone which leads n this album at times tales me there. But if the dark mutter of ‘thee individual visions ov jhonn’ is dark with resonating melancholia, The Magnitude Weighs Heavy brings things back to the light. ‘Whatever Will Become’ is a hybrid of pop and bubbling electronica, busy but mesmerising in its concentric circles of sound, its abrupt ending jolting the listener back to the moment.
The magnitude may weigh heavy, but this album has a remarkable lightness, delivered with a deftness of touch.
AA
Aural Aggravation 