Aural Aggravation

Southern Lord – 26th January 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

For a few fleeting seconds, my ears and my instinct say this is terrible, that the mix and mastering are all wrong: the guitars are thin and he vocals disproportionately high in the mix. But it’s just the opening bars, intended, it seems, to lull the listener into a false sense of calm. Because then everything kicks in full volume. And it’s one of those moments when all the needles whip into red and quiver as if asking, tremulously, ‘where do we go now?’ The answer is to remain, pressed hard to the right and in the red, shivering and straining at the limit of capacity, while the guitars churn hard and dense. If the lights are blinding, the sonic representation is, necessarily, deafening.

They promise – or threaten – a ‘harrowing, metallic, punk/crust-influenced hardcore, delivered with a calculated, very deliberate approach.’ They deliver all of this and more. The Lights Of This Earth Are Blinding is a big album. An intense album. A thunderously dense album, burning with raging metal nihilism. But also, it’s an album brimming with texture and detail.

The subtler, more gentle moments are exquisitely executed. ‘Wooden Hands’ begins with a delicate acoustic passage. It’s magnificent and moving it its own right. The picked guitar soft and warm as the notes drift into the air harmoniously intimating timeless pastoral folk, before everything slams in with obliterative force. And they’re by no means confined to sudden upsurges in volume for impact and effect, and nor are they all about the dynamics of brute force. Elsewhere, the lead guitar line that breaks from the sludgy morass on ‘May Love Be With You Always’ is magnificent in the way it pulls at the emotions, evoking more New Order’s ‘New Dawn Fades’ than anything by any touchstones from the heavy metal hall of fame.

‘A Bow Across a String’ pitches strains of feedback screeding from a wayward guitar against a spectacularly murk, dirty and utterly overdriven bass.

And yes, they know all about overdrive. ‘The Climb’ is built around a cyclical, bass-driven riff that lurches and lands in a splatter of guts between early Swans and early Melvins, while the hardcore howl of ‘The Endless Descent’ plunges further into a more metal take on the kind of repetitive riffage that dominated Nirvana’s first album. Round and round, stop / star / shudder / repeat…the effect is claustrophobic, the delivery furious.

AAA