Aural Aggravation

Voice of the Unheard/Shove Records – 10th January 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Italian / Swedish post-metal sextuplet Ropes Inside A Hole follow up their 2019 debut Autumnalia with an album that’s expansive, mellow, and melodic. I do often wonder just how much separation there is between the softer end of post-metal and the chunkier end of post-rock, and after years of straining my ears, I’m no closer to an answer. And So I Watch You From Afar are categorised as post-rock, but pack more riffs than a lot off post-metal. Than again, Pelican bring the riffs, but they’re balanced by so much space and texture, it doesn’t feel particularly metal.

Ropes Inside A Hole balance riffs and space, there’s no question of that, and it’s hard to really say if those riffs are rock or metal or anything really. What there can be no dispute about is the fact that those riffs are immense – as is the album as a whole. The six tracks are expansive to say the least: the shortest, ‘Overwhelmed’, is over five minutes long, and of the rest, four are well over seven-and-a-half minutes in duration. They really know how to conjure a soundscape, and A Man And His Nature is a rich and detailed work that is remarkably nuanced and at the same time intensely forceful. When the riffs hit, they hit alright, although for my money they sit more with the sustained crescendos common to many post-rock works, without the serrated bite of anything metal.

But does genre mater even remotely, especially when the music is this good? A Man And His Nature is a vast and ambitious set that really pushes the parameters.

‘Others Are Gone. I Don’t Care’ drifts along and chimes tunefully to begin, but when the distortion pedals hit and everything flares up so the band are firing on all cylinders and rocking it to eleven, it’s a thick, middy welter of noise that blasts from the speakers. The drums become muffled beneath it all, and the sense of volume is immense.

‘Loss and Grief’ introduces vocals, and in keeping with the title, they sound plaintive and lost, before ‘Feet in the Swamp, Gaze to the Sky’ brings – quite unexpectedly – a more jazzy vibe, and not just on account of the woodwind – specifically sax – sounds that breeze in and float around over the jangling guitar and loping drums, but also with the loose composition and rolling beats. Its mellow but it’s tense, too, and this is perhaps the most accurate summary of the album overall.

According to the band, the album was ‘Written during the pandemic and the global lockdown… [and] deals with feelings of isolation, doubt, nostalgia, fear and anger and also marks a shift in the band’s sound towards a more introspective approach materialized by the use of acoustic guitars, cello, violin and saxophone that contrasts perfectly with the more aggressive and heavy side of the band.’

All sides of the band are equally represented on A Man And His Nature. But the thing is, isolation is not something that seems to have really dissipated post-lockdown – because it was always there, and always will be. The pandemic only heightened underlying anxieties, and in some respects, were yet to fully leave lockdown and reclaim the lives we had before. It’s not simply that we’re still quaking and feeling insecure; many of us simply can’t afford to live the lives we had before, to gad bout by train, to visit people and places like we used to – assuming those people and places still exist.

The closer, ‘Time to Sleep’ begins as a beautifully simple acoustic song, and it builds through a series of transitions to hit peak crescendo and it maintains a sustained peak propelled by powerhouse percussion from around the mid-point of its immense eight minutes. It’s a truly glorious finale to an outstanding album.