Neurot Recordings – 16th May 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
Steve Von Till doesn’t really require any introduction or preamble: the chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re already aware of his work, and if not as a solo artist, then as the guitarist / vocalist with Neurosis, active between 1985 and 2019. As much as Neurosis were labelled a post-metal band, they very much forged their own sound, which has, to an extent, become the house style of Neurot Records.
Von Till’s solo works may lean more toward folk and the gentler side of that style, but nevertheless have significant heft, and Alone in a World of Wounds – his seventh solo album, the follow-up to No Wilderness Deep Enough (2020) is no exception (he’s been busy in the intervening years with a trilogy of Harvestman albums, all released in 2024). The heft here comes from a sense of gravitas, rather than volume and distortion, and continues the softer trajectory of its predecessor, an album ‘initially inspired by the harmonic resonance of piano and synths and his long-standing love of ambient music’.
‘The Corpse Road’ sees Von Till croak and croon in a fashion that could me taken for Mark Lanegan in a blind test, against a sparse backdrop of strings which swell and swoon, heavy with sadness and gloom. There is a sense of times past, not just fading memories and bygone days, but a sense of the creak of wood and worn clothing of harder but simpler times. I find myself unexpectedly transported to a walk my daughter and I undertook from Ambleside to Grasmere in the Lake District a year or so back, via the ‘Coffin Route’. It was winding, and wet, and uneven, not to mention long, and it’s billed as a ‘strenuous’ walk, while still suitable for tourists: as the rain battered the hood of my anorak, I found myself contemplating what it must have been like hauling an actual coffin along that four-mile stretch without the benefit of modern hiking gear. Life must have been tough. Von Till taps into the essence of these past times, and a sense of the elemental.
The mood remains lugubrious on ‘Watch Them Fade’, a song redolent with sadness and reflection, weighted down with the reminder that mortality affects us all and is never far. Despite the fact that life’s only certainty is its expiration, we continue to shy away from the topic. While Alone in a World of Wounds does not confront mortality and death head-on, it’s there at every turn. “Keep on diggin’… dig a little deeper” he implores on ‘Horizons Undone’, and while there are psychological connotations here, it’s hard to ignore images of graves.
The eight-minute ‘Calling Down the Darkness’ is a super-sparse piano-led slow-burner, and confounds any expectation for a surging finish by remaining low-key and minimal to the end, ad something about it is so, so achingly sad.
‘The Dawning of the Day (Insomnia)’ is a brief spoken-word interlude with a moody piano accompaniment, while paves the way – or perhaps scatters woodchips – for the arrival of the swirling atmospheric start of ‘Old Bent Pine’, another song which revels in the forces of nature, before the six-minute ‘River of no Return’ flows toward the finish. It has hints of Slowdive about it. Moreover, its superficial ominousness reminds us that rivers only flow in one direction, and as with rivers, so with life: there is no return, no replay, no turning back. there is no undoing mistakes, only not repeating them.
‘Alone in a World of Wounds’ may be a largely acoustic album, but it is still heavy – really heavy – emotionally more than sonically – and consequently not an easy one to process. It would be impossible to deny the album’s quality. But the weight, the sadness…
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Aural Aggravation 