Prophecy Productions – 3rd February 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
When I decided to strike out and create Aural Aggravation, the premise – at least in my head – was that I would write whatever I liked about whatever I liked, although the more detailed version of that was that I would pen essay-length reviews instead of the usual sub-three-hundred-word summaries that were, I suppose, about volume rather than depth. Equally, the idea at the time, back in 2016, was that it would be a vehicle by which to explore my relationship with music as much as the music itself. I haven’t always maintained this approach since: sometimes I’ve kicked out pieces simply chasing hits as the site has grown in its readership; others I’ve simply not felt like going deeper. And ultimately, I’ve thought ‘fuck it, my site, my platform’, and I have to say I’m comfortable with that. The quality of my writing is variable, and my typing and proofing even more so, but that’s part and parcel of keeping it real and with a view to the bigger picture that reviewing has to be – for me – about how I feel about the music I’m writing about. Because music isn’t something to simply be dissected clinically, assessed on technical merit. People listen to music because of the way it affects them, not because they’re on a battle of the bands panel critiquing like they’re judging Strictly.
You’d think that when things are unspeakably bleak and I’m facing struggles of a magnitude I find almost impossible to face, let alone articulate, the last thing I would want to do is wrap myself in a blanket of suffocatingly dark music, and that the last thing I could bear to listen to while in the process of arranging a funeral is anything by a band called FVNERALS.
But then psychology is complex.
I write to neutralise, to create distance. If it’s on the page, it’s not me, or my experience, it’s simply words. When I fell and broke my ribs some years back, I tore open the palm of my hand on landing. In shock, the first thing I did on arrival home wasn’t to clean the grit out and sterilize the bloody mess, but to photograph it. My wife asked why the hell I did that. It was a fair question. I hate blood, it makes me feel queasy, dizzy, faint. If it’s my own. A photograph of blood doesn’t bother me. So the photograph created separation. It was a hand, not my hand. If it had been my hand, I’d have probably passed out. A hand is just a picture, it’s just TV, like a movie.
I do not feel as if I am living in my own life right now. It doesn’t seem real. Having suffered a bereavement – expected, but at the same time unexpected – solace emerges from unexpected places. I’m not seeking comfort, and have no interest in exploring where I am on the journey of the five stages of bereavement. I am stepping back, and assessing the scene. It is not my life. And this is the soundtrack to my surveillance.
‘Darkness. FVNERALS have created an album that turns the emptiness of the void and the depth of the abyss into sound with their third full-length "Let the Earth Be Silent". The duo gives sonic shape to the silence of extinction that humankind brings to all life on earth and itself. Depression, isolation, and the despair that this existence brings ooze out of every note’.
Lead single and the album’s opening track, ‘Ashen Era’ sets the tone and is representative of the heavy, harrowing furrow the album ploughs, with warping, disorientating noise and disembodied vocals circulating in a mist around thunderous but muffled percussion. It’s all-immersive, dark, dense, and listening to it feels like being buried alive, but at the same time transcendental.
A crashing gong heralds the opening of the scene that is ‘Horror Eats the Light’, released back in November as a single. It’s a bass-dominated exercise in heavy, droning doom and ethereality.
The album’s song titles really do speak for the album as a whole: ‘Annihilation’, Yearning’, ‘Barren’. This is bleak and harrowing stuff. ‘Yearning’ begins brittle, before exploding into a landslide of crushing guitars bearing down. The beats – crashing a light year apar, paired with bass notes landing like detonations event minute or so, this is heavy, but a different kind of heavy.
‘Yearning’ pitches that kind of Swand circa ‘86 crawling dirginess with crushing weight paired with a sepulchral glooming ambience, while the album’s last track, ‘Barren,’ lives up to its title, presenting eight-and-a-half minutes of crushing gloom with ethereal vocals which ascend heavenwards like angels on a zephyr.
Let the Earth Be Silent feels like the final shudders of a dying planet, the collapsing death throes of eternity. It’s a vast and at times quite overwhelming experience. The sound is immense and there’s something of a ceremonial feel about parts of it, but elsewhere it simply feels like the outpourings of grief and is hard to listen to under any circumstances. It chokes you up. There’s something final and ultimately funereal about the droning organ that hovers out to the end, and it leaves you to reflect on the idea – the end. It’s beyond comprehension. But on Let the Earth Be Silent, FVNERALS have created an album that paves the way towards acceptance.
AA
Aural Aggravation 