Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Microtub – Bite of the Orange

Posted: 26 January 2017 in Albums
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Whereas many microtonal explorations manifest as tiny, pinging blips, Microtub’s Bite of the Orange is constructed using immense, elongated notes. Perhaps somewhat obscurely and tangentially, I find myself considering Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’, specifically the following couplet:

My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.

No, not on account of the popular tumescent implications most readings of the lines offer: I’ve even explored the mirthsome connotations of Marvell’s emerging bulbous courgette during undergraduate seminars in an attempt to draw some kind of engagement from a room of late teens who really couldn’t give a crap about Elizabethan poetry, but that’s not why Bite of the Orange evokes Marvell in my mind. Instead, I’m drawn by the poem’s allusions to the Aristotelean connotations of a love borne out of the vegetative soul, as commented on at length by Lawrence Burton in his magnificent Anatomy of Melancholy, one of my favourite 17th Century texts (largely, it’s true, on account of Burton’s magnificent language). Burton makes a connection between the ‘vegetative soul’ and ‘natural love’; a love which is a slow-growing, evolutionary condition.

Granted, an orange is not a vegetable, but, like this slow-growing love, Bite of the Orange moves at an almost imperceptible pace, organic. Microtub’s slow, microtonal explorations require patience, and it’s only through time that a true appreciation of its qualities and its sonic depths can be truly appreciated.

The three tracks seep into one another, both in terms of the structures of their titles, and sonically. ‘Violet Man’ ventures into the dark, its low rumblings feeling their way through subterranean territories and poking the deepest recesses of the mind, and the three long-firm tracks combine to offer a full, panoramic perspective on the nuanced tonalities three microtonal tubas can create.

Bite of the Orange is not an album of action. It is an album which unfurls, creeping, revealing its aspects in greater detail the more closely one listens.

Microtub

Vagabond Specter – Mirrors

Posted: 26 January 2017 in Albums
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January 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s nothing wrong with pop. Critics the world over will tell you that pop is trash, that it has less artistic currency than any other musical style. We don’t mean it, at least as abrasively and directly as all that. And those who do man it are terrible snobs who lack the broadmindedness to be a just critic. Any music critic worth paying attention to loves pop – good pop. This means I’m not talking about the mass-produced r’n’b slop that proliferates in the top 40. What, they dispensed with that? Well, R1 did, and that perhaps shows just how devalued mainstream pop has become. But moving on… pop isn’t always a dirty word. Quality pop is a rare find.

Balancing expansive, bombastic, surging songs with more introspective, low-key yet deft and accessible songs, Ukrane’s Vagabond Specter produce pop of a rare quality: their synth-led songs are dreamy, layered. Pablo Specter, the band’s singer dispenses lyrics – his voice heavily processed and accented – about swans and dancing, and he’s got a decent range which spans from the light and soaring to a crooning baritone.

They’re not lightweight or lacking in substance or imagination, either. There’s a magical electronic snowstorm in the middle of ‘Scars as Notes’, and ‘Dancing in the Light’ has guitar chug, buoyant synths and a bouncy vocal, and calls to mind XTC’s ‘Making Plans for Nigel’. XTC are a perfect example of a pop band and ‘Making Plans for Nigel’ is as good a pop song as you’ll ever hear. This is not critical opinion: it’s fact. So, by associative connections, Vagabond Specter are a great pop band, and ‘Mirrors’ is a great album. And it is: as much as it’s steeped in nostalgia and historicity, it’s a cracking pop album which harks back to certain vintage. There’s nothing wrong with that: great songs defy genre, age and epoch.

 

Vagabond Specter

The Necks – Unfold

Posted: 25 January 2017 in Albums
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Ideologic Organ – SOMA025 – 10th February 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

The accompanying press release is instructive and informative as to the premise of the latest offering from The Necks. Entering their thirtieth year of their existence, the trio continue to innovate and to create music which expands the parameters of jazz music:

The latest document from this long-running ensemble, Unfold, presents itself as a double LP, with four side-length tracks. A deliberate absence of numbered sides hands a substantial swatch of participation over to the listener, allowing her to navigate his own path through the soundscape at hand. The shorter length of the vinyl format, far from being a constraint upon the members of the ensemble, instead offers them a more compact horizon to contemplate, wherein the distance travelled is recalibrated to more immediate and dynamic textural concerns.

The title is appropriate, in that it gives a fitting indication of the nature of the compositions. Although the vinyl format is pitched as being a ‘shorter’ format, the fact that each track occupies a full side of this double album means that each piece still has a running time of between fifteen and twenty-one minutes. And unfold is what they do: gradual evolutions, slow unfurlings and near-imperceptible outspreadings which creep from sparse to near-overwhelming.

‘Blue Mountain’ begins with a delicate piano, but over time builds in depth, tension and pace to a sustained crescendo that never quite breaks. It simmers long and leisurely, cymbal crashes rising in intensity, resembling an intro to a track on a recent Swans album. I mean this as a compliment: it’s a lengthy piece, but there’s movement, there are dynamics, there’s a tangible sense of trajectory.

Noodling Hammond keys wander over a slow, pulsating undulation on ‘Overhear’, and it’s hypnotic and mellow. Perhaps the most overtly ‘jazz’ composition, it also encapsulates perfectly the wide-ranging elements The Necks incorporate within their music. Bongos bubble up jittery rhythms while the trilling organ notes meander and weave, intersecting time signature s forging an increasing sense of spatial disorientation over time.

The tribal rhythms which dominate ‘Ride’ slowly but surely increase in pace, raising the tension as the elongated, barely perceptible notes hang in slow suspense. Ultimately, the pace reaches a frenetic peak, before collapsing into arrhythmia , a conglomeration of discord and distempo, and the fourth track, ‘Timepiece’ is nothing short of a bewildering chaos of percussion, discord and orchestrated dissonance. Against the clattering rattle of drums and more, bass notes resonate and xylophone notes ring out in different directions, and over time, it becomes increasingly unsettling disorientating, difficult.

Unfold is by no means an easy album. It’s by no means a ‘jazz’ album in conventional terms. But in terms of an album which bounces off the wall in myriad unexpected directions freeforming and freewheeling as the musicians explore interpersonal musical boundaries, it’s the epitome of jazz. It’s also really rather good. Well, it is a Necks album, after all.

The Necks - Unfold

Uniform Choice – Screaming For Change

Posted: 22 January 2017 in Albums
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Southern Lord – 20th January 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s part and parcel of the music critic’s remit to know anything and everything about all music, and to have an opinion on it all, too. More importantly, the music critic’s job description entails knowing more about music than you, irrespective of anything. Go on, talk to me about music. I’ll gush about some of the things you life if they’re cool, and I’ll shit over everything else, demolishing your favourite bands on which because I’m the fucking expert. Why? What drives this propensity for inordinately cunty behaviour? Think about it. In the age of the internet, everyone’s a fucking expert. So how else do we justify our position if not by proving we’re more expert, more opinionated and more eloquent in our critiques?

So, it’s confession time: much as I dig a fair bit of proper, old-school US hardcore, I do not profess to be an expert. Having not heard of Uniform Choice, I asked a friend of mine who’s a proper fan of US hardcore for his opinion on Uniform Choice. He hadn’t heard of them either, which means he’s not as much of a fan or expert as I took him for, or Uniform Choice are really bloody obscure. Either is equally likely, and Southern Lord’s commitment to excavating lesser-known bands of the heyday of hardcore is laudable.

But I did have misgivings about Uniform Choice: the press release promises ‘furious hardcore energy and a signature vocal delivery combine with empowering lyrical output to formulate one of the most renowned and longstanding albums of the ‘80s hardcore scene.’ ‘Fourteen straightedge anthems’ I can handle, but something doesn’t sit to comfortably: namely, the fact Uniform Choice are pitched as ‘California’s godfathers of positive hardcore’.

‘It’s going to be shit,’ I told my friend.

‘You need to be more positive,’ he replied.

‘Ok, I’m positive it’s going to be shit,’ I told him.

I’m funny like that. It’s the way I tell ‘em.

But really, isn’t positive hardcore a dismal oxymoron which sits in the same field as Christian metal?

Sonically, Screaming For Change, their first full-length album, originally released in 1986, is incendiary, a blistering, fiery powerhouse of punk rock noise, an album which encapsulates the ferocity, the intensity, and the raw, brutal determination of the early hardcore movement to make a difference. The songs are – as you’d expect – hard, fast and short. The drums are hell-for-leather and the guitars a furious chug. The production is surprisingly crisp, with clear separation between the instruments. Screaming for Change finds Uniform Choice exploit many popular punk tropes, with terrace-chant ‘choruses’ – the title shouted out a few times, as on ‘Use Your Head’ and shouted vocals bellowing out the expletive-filled lyrics so fast half the words are impossible to catch.

It’s all about the force of expression, and more about the sentiment than the melody: ‘it’s all the same / and I’m tired of taking the fucking blame!’

The ‘positive’ aspect doesn’t come across as preaching, and despite titles like ‘Straight and Alert’ and ‘My Own Mind,’ ‘Don’t Quit’, Uniform Choice are pissed off and looking to smash the system. But instead of blind nihilistic rage, theirs is a message that celebrates the idea that there are alternatives, that you don’t have to follow the crowd, that shit as everything is, you don’t have to perpetuate the same shit yourself. And I’m down with that.

 

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Battle Lines – Primal

Posted: 20 January 2017 in Albums
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No Sleep Records – 16th September 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

I have to admit, I’d been wondering what was happening with Battle lines. Following the single releases ‘Colonies’ and ‘Hunting’ (split with Post War Glamour Girls), and a storming set at the Brudenell to launch it, there was talk of an album when I chatted with the band afterwards, and then… Well, they seemed to drop off the radar. Carly had mentioned work and all of the things that get in the way of doing things, although it was some time ago, and I’d had a few pints during the evening and what with work and an endless stream of new releases demanding my attention… well, I sort of forgot about things. I’m sorry for the fact that this makes me the same as pretty much everyone else: I blame the ‘net age, the insane pace of our post-postmodern culture, where memories are overlaid and replaced in an instant, buried in the endless blizzard of shiny new things, images, sounds, more bad news and another media frenzy over the latest celebrity scandal. And so, a guilty late review of an album by a band I’m a big fan of.

While I’m looking around at intangibles to blame, I’m also aware that I’m feeding my own anxieties and understanding more the pressure on any artist, in any medium, to devote as much time to promotion as to the production of actual art. It’s all about the momentum! Paradoxically, to weather the storm that is the blizzard of social media, one is required to contribute to it further, and constantly. If you’re out of the public eye, you’re forgotten in a flash. It’s an absurd situation, of course: artists need to retreat in order to produce. In an over-loud world, silence is good, and importantly, silence from a band means they’re likely holed up working on material.

Battle Lines, individually and collectively, have been getting on with their lives, and thankfully, have been doing the things that are important, instead of fretting over their public profile. The press release apologises for their apparent absence, but is matter-of-fact about things:

It’s not a secret that we’ve been very quiet over the last year… There’s no big story, we love each other, we’re as good friends as we’ve ever been. Life has moved on for all of us, and we now reside in New York, London, Brighton and Leeds, geography prevents us from touring, but it can’t prevent us from releasing new music.

And so, while I was busy being distracted, Battle Lines slipped out their debut album, a record I’d waited more years than I care to count for: having first discovered them in their previous guise as Alvin Purple, I’d been captivated by the quality and richness of their dark, post-punk influenced material and the incredibly assured live performances they gave so consistently.

The switch to Battle Lines marked a refocusing: the energy which effused from their earlier songs was directed more inward, and the material displayed an almost ascetic discipline in its execution on those first single releases and in the live shows, more clinical, more icily intense than their previous incarnation.

This is all captured perfectly on Primal. The sparse title track and album opener hints equally at The XX and Closer era Joy Division. But then, glacial electropop undercurrents and thunderous tribal drumming also define the sound. And the sound… the fact they’ve taken their time over this means that the sound is honed to perfection. There isn’t a note out of place. That isn’t to say it’s overproduced within an inch of its sterile life or stripped of its soul: they’ve pulled everything to tight as to render it almost claustrophobically dense, a work which offers an insight into a near-obsessive control over the output. In context, it makes sense:

There’s an honesty about the notes which accompany the release which is at once uncomfortable and refreshing:

Lyrically this was an incredibly dark place to go to, I had come out of a relationship that became mentally abusive; looking back I wondered who I had become in excusing that kind of behaviour. This is what drove me in the album, those darkest moments became a journey of self discovery and a realisation of who I really am and what I deserved.

When life is out of control, what can you do but obsess about the things you can control – your art? But from darkness comes light, and creativity can be so cathartic. As dark as Primal is, it contains some truly beautiful and magnificently uplifting musical moments. Carly’s vocals at times soar so high as to disappear from the register of the average human ear, but ‘Sea of Fear’ is a swelling anthem of a track, and the sunburst shoegaze of ‘Smother’ ripples with the joy of drinking in clear air and rediscovering the potentialities of life.

‘Outsider’ is built around an insistent motoric beat and exploits the quiet / loud dynamic, bursting into explosive shoegaze wall-of-FX guitars which call to mind Ride in their early years, but as is always the case with Battle Lines, Carly’s ultra-high-frequency vocals means they don’t really sound like any of their forebears, or their contemporaries.

Of their single releases, only ‘Hunting’ has made it to the album. This is a bold and admirable choice, and one which makes a statement: a statement which says that \Primal is an album proper, a document, and not a ‘Hunting’ is, of course, a belting wall of noise driven by a twitchy disco beat and shuddering synth with metallic screeds of guitar peeling off a Donna Summer groove, over which Carly comes on like Siouxsie Sioux, breathy and intense.

The album concludes with ‘Riot’, a richly-layered and uplifting song which blossoms in a screed of guitar noise over an insistent rhythm section, the drums and bass tight and locked into a sedate groove.

Primal displays remarkable poise, and as much as its architecture is concerned with the turbulence which inspired its lyrics and overall tone, its coherence and control are remarkable. But rather than feeling soulless in its clinical execution, there’s a clear sense that Primal is about holding it together and showing just what can be achieved through sheer will and determination and the exertion of mind over matter. Despite the obstacles, personal and geographical, Battle Lines have (meticulously) produced a powerful album that was more than worth the wait.

 

Battle Lines - Primal

Ashley Reaks – Growth Spurts

Posted: 17 January 2017 in Albums
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6th December 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Some reviews are seemingly fated. This is one such review: I was slow to get started, and then, having spent several evenings working on a detailed critical analysis, exploring the album’s wild eclectism on a more or less track-by-track basis in a discourse of some eight hundred words, my laptop crashed and most of the work was lost, with the only available version being a collection of notes which were days old. How it happened, when my word processor is set to autosave every five minutes, I have no idea. Thanks Microsoft.

Still, this is an Ashley Reaks album, and a man who can produce three albums in a year – and continue to produce art, and to gig relentlessly, under difficult personal circumstances – deserves the same kind of unbowing attitude from a reviewer.

Because it’s an Ashley Reaks album, anything can happen. And it will. And it does. Following on from Reaks’ ‘punk album’ This is Planet Grot (and a remarkable credible and impressive punk album at that), Growth Spurts, on the one hand, could be considered a return to more familiar territories. But then, on the other, it could justifiably be tagged his ‘jazz album’. The familiar elements of reggae and post-punk inspired dub are present and correct, but this collaboration-based collection of tunes also brings in some wild jazz stylings. The collaborative element is also key here, not only to appreciating Growth Spurts, but to understanding Reaks as an artist, at least as much as it’s possible to grasp such an idiosyncratic and singular individual.

Like his collage artwork, his music is a mish-mash of elements drawn from here, there and everywhere, often bolted together at weird angles and demonstrating incompatible proportions and lines of perspective. He has very much his own slant on things, and his approach is also very much his own: Reaks is one of the few artists who consistently produces work which has the capacity to surprise, to confound, and, occasionally, confuse – which is a healthy response to something which is so staunchly unconventional. You get the impression that Reaks’ raison d’être is to produce art which surprises and confounds himself, as much as any notional audience. His mindset appears to be that if it’s not fresh, unexpected, and if it’s not sincere, then it’s worthless. Collaboration, when done right, yields an output which is greater than the sum of its parts, and draws out facets of each contributor which may not otherwise be known.

As such, Growth Spurts is a world away from his previous collaborative effort, Cultural Thrift (2015) with poet Joe Hakim, on which Reaks stepped toward the rear portion of the stage to provide a background accompaniment (which in itself was a departure given Reaks’ propensity for dizzying soundclashes). Five of the ten pieces – it would be wrong to refer to this as a collection of songs, given that they feature spoken word and poetry – feature writers and poets from a broad and diverse range of backgrounds. They’re disparate characters, as varied as Reaks’ own sources of input, hand-picked to contribute to the album.

The result is dizzying, a rollercoaster journey through a vast swathe of cultural terrain. Each of the collaborative pieces is distinct and different, and finds Reaks attentive to the style of the different speakers. And as the strange, strangles vocal cacophony which introduces the album’s first track, the oddly ominous prog-dub drum‘n’bass neoclassical jazz mixup that is ‘Divorced from the Body’ shows, he’s digging deep to locate new and unexpected hybrids. And yet, amidst the chaos, he still whips up some killer hooks – something so many experimental / genre-smashing artists completely overlook in their quest to innovate, to dazzle with their imagination and technical prowess.

‘The Gentle Art of Ignoring’ with Sylvie Hill is the most outright jazz track on the album, and her sassy vocal delivery and confident Canadian accent brings another sharp dimension to an album which displays almost infinite dimensions, but there’s just so much to take in. But if you need a pointer for where to start, start with the basslines. The crashing jazz-influenced drum ‘n’ bass drumming, the wild brass, the myriad perspectives of the different vocalists all slot into place over those low-down basslines that stroll and groove and leap and boogie. Get on down.

 

Ashley Reaks - Growth Spurts

Aidan Baker w/ Claire Brentnall – Delirious Things

Posted: 15 January 2017 in Albums
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The premise of this collaboration between Aidan Baker and Claire Brentnall of Manchester-based purveyors of ethereal dark pop, Shield Patterns, is neatly summed up in the press release. It’s not an indication of lethargy to quote directly and at length but a recognition of the fact that a label or PR has the best handle on what it’s doing, and is every bit as capable of articulation as a journo. So much so, that there are those who also have a handle on the possessive apostrophe, for which respect is due. So, ‘Delirious Things is an exploration of Aidan Baker’s interest in 80s-influenced cold-wave, shoegaze, and synth-pop from such recording artists as Factory Records’ Durutti Column, Joy Division, and Section 25 and 4AD’s Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil’.

‘Combining song-oriented tracks with abstract interludes, the primary instrument on Delirious Things is a 1980s Casio synthesizer, rather than Baker’s usual guitar, though the synth is processed through his usual guitar effect pedals, creating heavy, layered washes of droning synth sounds overlaying electronic rhythms and pulsing bass lines. Baker is joined by guest vocalist Claire Brentnall, whose voice is reminiscent of Liz Fraser and Kate Bush but still distinctly her own.’

It’s a curiously hushed, tempered work and it’s the overall sense of quietness which is its most striking feature. We live in a loud world. As I noted when reviewing Jeffrey Roden’s Threads of a Prayer – Volume 1, I find it increasingly difficult to find the time and space to listen to quieter, more contemplative music: the ‘noise’ of the fast-paced society in which we now live is no longer a metaphor, and it’s evermore difficult to find a moment’s peace, metaphorically or literally. I’m not in a position to offer empirical evidence to substantiate the correlation between the pace and volume of life with the increasing prevalence of mental health issues because I’m a) a lazy journalist b) too busy to invest time on such detours while researching album c) struggling with my own anxieties (aren’t we all in our various ways, whether we admit it or not?). All that said, it’s perhaps also worth noting that despite the bewildering quantity of releases I receive to review, either physically or digitally, the number of works which dare to explore such low volume registers are few and far between. This means that while often being barely audible in some settings, such releases stand out alone by virtue of their difference. But, significantly, Delirious Things also stands out on merit.

Delirious Things is an album which is rich in atmosphere, but there’s something about it which feels uncomfortable and radiates a subtle but inescapable sense of discomfort. It takes a while to ascertain precisely what it is that’s awkward and vaguely discombobulating about it. Superficially, the songs are spacious, atmospheric dreamworks, th tructures loosely defined, the sounds partially abstract, the emotions they convey as fleeting and ephemeral as the recollection of the sensations and images of a dream on waking.

There’s an icy fragility about the songs, and Brentnall’s breathy vocals – as much reminiscent of Cranes’ Alison Shaw and Toni Halliday of Curve as the common touchstones of PJ Harvey and Kate Bush – are captivating yet, at the same time, also subliminal in their power. Laid down in layer upon harmonising layer, her voice is everywhere, and drifts from every corner of the music and even the silence between the sounds. This is nowhere more true than on the album’s vaporous final track, ‘Shivering’, which delicately glides beneath the skin and brushes at the bones and the soft matter beneath. The funereal ‘Dead Languages’ has echoes of late Joy Division or Movement era New Order, and distils its sonic elements to a stark minimalism that’s spine-tinglingly powerful.

 

Aidan & Claire

 

Beneath the surface, ripples of tension radiate and currents of darkness surge, silently but powerfully. Baker utilises stereo panning to optimal effect and subtle details like a fractional lag between beats across the left and right channels are incredibly effective, particularly when listening through headphones (which is strongly advised, because it facilitates optimal appreciation of the detail, while also reducing the bled of noise from the outside world, be it the babble of work colleagues, the hum of the boiler or the whirr of the laptop fan: reducing extraneous interference is essential in order to absorb the meticulous detail of this album). There are fractional delays between some of the beats between the channels. The effect is barely perceptible, but nevertheless a tiny bit disorientating. Of course, once you’ve noticed this, you can’t unnoticed. It’s impossible to tune out. But tuning in and embracing the It’s when one begins to look closer into the album’s detail that its true magic discloses itself.

On the surface, it’s a collection of quiet, calm, opiate-slow songs with a misty, hazy quality. How does this, and the referencing of the Cocteau Twins reconcile with 80s-influenced cold-wave, shoegaze, and synth-pop? Again, it’s in the detail: Delirious Things incorporates stylistic elements of all of the above, but reconfigures them, so, so carefully. The album’s success lies in the way it draws together recognisable genre trappings and familiar stylistic tropes and renders them in a fashion which is similar enough to be still familiar and yet different enough so as to be unfamiliar. What is different about this? you will likely ask yourself. In the mixing – the pitching of the beats way down in the mix, the way in which the sound is scaled down and paired back and stripped out of made for radio / iPod compression and exists with a very different set of production values. This gives Delirious Things a feeling of freshness, and ultimately renders it a triumph of artistic vision over commercial conformity.

 

PL055-LPjacket

Monocube – The Rituals

Posted: 12 January 2017 in Albums
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Malignant Records

Christopher Nosnibor

You know this is going to be not so much dark, as positively black, right? Look at the cover art: there’s a fucking goat on it. Nothing say terrifyingly, inhumanly bleak, satanic metal noise rage like a horned goat on an album’s sleeve. Ever since Bathory’s gut-churningly nasty, backer-than-back, dredged from the bowels of hell debut, the goat has been the signifier.

Monocube know all about dark atmospherics: the album begins with ominous fear tones hanging in a shroud of creeping mist. They’re master of the slow-build, too: the album’s first track, ‘Visiones III’ is nine minutes in length, the whispering ambience and contrails of darkness hovering in the air as the listener is led through uncertain, uncharted territory as the nebulous sonic cloud lowly turns in space. This isn’t nearly as gnarly as the cover art suggests though. What’s going on?

‘Drowned Sun’ lunges into the subterranean realms of dark ambience and burrows its way toward a chthonic unpleasantness. With a heaving (heat) beat and yawning undulating drones it’s wholly uncomfortable listening. ‘Downward’ follows the same dark ambient path, inching into the bowel-trembling depths of Sunn O))) and Earth in their dronetastic first iteration. The low-end frequencies hurt, while the shifting higher levels disorientate and unsettle.

It’s becoming apparent that this is no thrashy, guitar-based black metal effort – although it is seriously fucking dark. The weight of the endless, grating drones which swirl and eddy menacingly is monumentally oppressive.

Perhaps you, like me, have deduced that the goat was a lie at least on a superficial level. Monocube aren’t a band you’ll find lurking in the woods, daubed in corpse paint. They aren’t about making heavy guitar noise and snarling like extras from ‘The Walking Dead’. Perhaps because of this, rather than in spite of it, they’re a whole lot scarier.

 

Monocube - The Rituals

Esben and the Witch – Older Terrors

Posted: 7 January 2017 in Albums
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Season of Mist – 4th November 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

The music industry may have changed dramatically since the advent of the Internet – a shift which became perhaps more noticeable marked around the turn of the millennium and has become exponential, transforming the way the whole system operates beyond all recognition in the last decade or thereabouts – but one thing remain largely unchanged, and that’s the way promotion works. I’m not referring to thy myriad alternative channels available through new media, ranging from the viral video to the release slipped out with no promo whereby word of (virtual) mouth alone can catapult a release into the stratosphere. I’m not talking about live streams or download-only bonus packages, either. I am, of course, perhaps predictable, talking about reviews. While some bands dismiss this aspect of promotion and sneer at critics, reviews can – and do – give exposure to acts who likely wouldn’t have otherwise been brought to the public’s attention, or as widely. But the focus is on the buzz around the release. There’s often a clamour to be the first to review a forthcoming release, and in the weeks either side of a release, it’s all about getting the reviews in.

But sometimes, this can backfire. Some albums really do take a fair while to bed in. they require – and deserve – time to be digested, for quality cogitation before finally imparting a balanced critical assessment. What do you want, a knee-jerk snapshot summary, or a more considered appraisal? I know what I want as a music fan. As such, I make no apology for the fact I’ve been slow with this. Having been particularly impressed by A New Nature, it was clear that Older Terrors would not be an immediate album, and with just four tracks filling its half-hour run-time, it’s not a collection of instant-gratification radio-friendly pop tunes that’s on offer.

This album landed with me around the same time as Neurosis’ Fires Within Fires. The Neurosis album failed to move me and proved, ultimately to be an immense disappointment, while Older Terrors struck me as utterly gripping. How could to albums which, in the face of things, share so much common ground and effectively be born from a very similar template, elicit such diametrically different reactions? I’ve spent a long time wrestling with this question, and will return to it shortly.

It perhaps goes without saying that this is epic. It’s an Esben and the Witch album, after all. But there’s something about the four tracks which comprise Older Terrors which really do redefine the band’s direction, and expands upon the long-form approach hinted at on their 2014 split release with Thought Forms.

‘Sylvan’ starts with a delicately picked guitar and backed-off drum, which flutters in the mist of the ancient forest. There’s no denying the captivating, mesmeric power of Rachel Davies’ voice. She conjures truly beautiful notes, but at the same time, there’s a weight, a deep-seated sense of longing, mourning, an ache which resonates with every breath. Hers is not a rock or metal voice, but a folk voice, which coveys far more than the words themselves – although the lyrics, too evoke deep, dark, medieval woodlands and mystical wildernesses. For the most part, the song shows great restraint, holding back the tidal wave of noise in favour of forging atmosphere and majestic sonic vistas. But when the levee breaks, it’s a magnificent burst of shoegaze /post-rock / metal which stands shoulder to shoulder with Jesu at their best. ‘Come with me… to the place where the wolves are weak,’ Davies implores. Something in the way she sings it makes you want to go with her.

It’s not about the difference between Rachel Davies’ vocal delivery and that of Scott Kelly which places so much distance between Esben and the Witch and Neurosis, though, although the depth of emotion conveyed is certainly a factor. The other key elements are the song structures and the fundamental nature of how the songs are played. The song structures on Older Terrors is unpredictable, in contrast to the formulaic approach which defines Fires Within Fires. Esben and the Witch hold back those raging guitar tempests; there are feints, sleights and even outright denials, which make the thunderous crescendos even more gratifying.

‘Marking the Heart of a Serpent’ explodes into raging blasts of noise, in between enticing, alluring verses, and culminates in a truly immense crescendo which transcends the earthly mores of rock music. ‘The Wolf’s Sun’ lumbers through Arthurian woodlands, with ruptures of fire and brimstone conjuring scenes of bruised fearfulness. Closer ‘The Reverist’ is hushed, thoughtful, ponderous and haunting, but still yields a climax of crushing weight. I truth, that’s a vast understatement. I mean, it’s beyond immense.

There’s something ultimately natural about Older Terrors too. While the grainy timbres of the guitars are a key element to the sound, the ragged edges which show in the raw, powerhouse drumming and mammoth riffs when they eventually tear through feel like they’re necessary rather than strategic, as if they can hold back no more and simply have to break out. And when they do break out, the mammoth guitar and thunderous drums are counterbalanced by truly beautiful vocals.

So while the dynamic focus calls to mind Neurosis, the deep, dark, mystical folk leanings of Older Terrors shares more with latter-day Earth and the hypnotic currents of Pain Teens at their most spaced out.

Older Terrors is a remarkable and extremely powerful album, which operates on a subconscious, spiritual level, rather than an explicitly musical, immediate level. It’s anything but immediate, and in truth, it’s an album which requires a lot of patience. But it’s immensely rewarding, and resonates on levels far beyond words.

 

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