Tag Archives: colin marston

Review: Pyramids – A Northern Meadow

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Pyramids are four seemingly random Joes from Denton, Texas, who have managed to attract some huge names in the world of music, possibly through their completely ridiculous album covers. Well, maybe not that, but the genre-defying oddity known as Pyramids and their associated acts have shown an uncanny knack for recruiting stars to their projects. Originally signed to Aaron Turner’s (Isis, Old Man Gloom) acclaimed Hydra Head Records, they managed a transition to metal’s newest cutting edge label, Profound Lore, as soon as the former went defunct. Their self-titled debut in 2008 scored Colin Marston (Krallice), Vindsval (Blut Aus Nord), and Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu), among others, to contribute to a remix album, while band leader R. Loren’s White Moth and Sailors with Wax Wings projects have featured David Tibet (Current 93), Alec Empire (Atari Teenage Riot), Jonas Renkse (Katatonia), John Gossard (Weakling), Simon Scott (Slowdive), Hildur Guðnadóttir (múm), and Aaron Stainthorpe (My Dying Bride), to name… a few? The 2009 follow-up, a collaborative album with Nadja, featured Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins), and there’s an Ulver remix of it floating around out there. They also lead some cassette tape project with 49 bands I’ve never heard of and This Will Destroy You.

In spite of the absolutely ridiculous, confounding string of names I just threw out, this band remains pretty damn obscure. A Northern Meadow, their first full-length since 2009, may well change all that, with positive reviews on sites like Pitchfork Media ensuring them a moment in the spotlight. Moreover, Colin Marston and Vindsval are active guest musicians this time, with pretty encompassing roles.

track: “In Perfect Stillness, I’ve Only Found Sorrow”

The opening track, “In Perfect Stillness, I’ve Only Found Sorrow”, kicks off with Marston’s quintessential tremolo and Vindsval’s equally iconic drum programming, while R. Loren’s vocals quickly cue us into the fact that this isn’t going to be a straight metal album. Instead, we face a prolonged melancholy that finds its essence in the vocals and never really resolves into anything. This brooding approach carries throughout the album, but as the minutes tick by you can notice a slight sort of development–little hints at a more complex animal below the surface. “The Earth Melts Into Red Gashes Like The Mouths Of Whales” rises out of the plod for thirty seconds of really catchy guitar before dissolving back into bleak noise. “The Substance Of Grief Is Not Imaginary” feels like a Blut Aus Nord song in slow motion, offering all of their accustomed madness with none of the speed or volume, while Loren briefly confounds the mood with a really beautiful but short lived vocal melody. “Indigo Birds” extends the vocal presence, with Loren singing longer with more effects and range. As the song dissolves out into distorted droning and ultimately three minutes of dissonant synth, the album approaches a modest transition in character. The interlude resets the mood, allowing the remainder of the album to take, I think, a slightly more abrasive or confrontational approach.

Track: “I Am So Sorry, Goodbye”

The second half of the album is more distinct, with more drive in the guitar and a faster rate of transition. “I Have Four Sons, All Named For Men We Lost To War” starts off with the most crushing tones on the album, enhanced in their finality by the still slow pace set by Vindsval’s drums. “I Am So Sorry, Goodbye” has a really memorable industrial groove, with some synth tones that invoke for the first time in me a real vision of something… perhaps ancient, a sort of primordial ruin made all the older by Loren’s forlorn, beautiful vocals. Like “Indigo Birds”, the song dissolves out into low-tuned guitar and synth droning, but the feeling is more complete. The substance of the song gives you more to reflect on in the haze of noise that follows.

On “I Am So Sorry, Goodbye” and growing throughout the remainder of the album, Loren’s vocals start to sound subtly reminiscent of Chino Moreno to me–high-pitch meanderings that feel slightly unstable yet always harmonious. It’s an effect he pulls off well, and it makes the album feel rather back-loaded to me. “Consilience” wraps things up with a turn back to the darker side. More chaotic, and with a new touch of pessimism to the vocals, it concludes an already morbid album on a particularly bleak note. Oppressive synth creeps its way in a bit earlier, and a hard stop takes us to fading noise and silence.

A Northern Meadow leaves me with pretty mixed feelings. R. Loren has a clear aural agenda that he sticks to throughout, yet I can’t escape the feeling that the album’s highest points were those most distant from the overarching theme. The beat-down opening of “I Have Four Sons…”, the synth early in “I Am So Sorry, Goodbye”, Marston’s driving 30-second sweep in “The Earth Melts…”, the short-lived vocal burst at the start of “My Father, Tall as Goliath”… I find myself anticipating these finer moments through a lot of the moody grind, rather than just enjoying the ride and taking the highs as they hit me. That grind has a lot of character at times, especially the further into the album I get, but not enough to match the talent Loren was working with here.

I guess I would say that A Northern Meadow is a very unique album, and I love Loren’s dedication to uniting awesome musicians, but I don’t feel very compelled to keep listening to it as the novelty begins to wear off. If its slightly chaotic morbidity strikes a chord with you, you might love it, but if you can’t connect to that feeling it will inevitably grow tedious at times. Marston’s noodling isn’t extensive enough to keep me constantly engaged the way a Krallice album can–a tall order, considering how equally brilliant that band’s other three members are–nor do I think Vindsval’s drum tones hold up in this sort of mono-tempo drag. It doesn’t help that both musicians inevitably play themselves. Like say, Humphrey Bogart or Morgan Freeman, they are so distinctly themselves that you feel like you’re hearing the actors, not the characters they are meant to portray. There is nothing of the instrumental synergy both produce in their main bands. I don’t hear the chemistry of two great musicians working together here. I just hear two great musicians, like some mash-up with Loren mixing vocals and synth into the pot. There may be some truth to that: if I understood Loren’s recent interview with Decibel Magazine correctly, I’m pretty sure Vindsval and Marston had no direct communication while crafting this.

I’m not saying A Northern Meadow is bad. Not at all. But it does leave me wanting something more. I can’t help but wonder what could come out of Loren, Marston, and Vindsval sitting down in a recording studio together, and I suspect it would be something more substantive than this, with a lot more motion and a lot less gloom. But that meeting might be pretty difficult to arrange, and who knows whether they would see eye to eye if Loren had allowed them less freedom to do their own things. I might yet get into this, if I can get over what it isn’t sufficiently to appreciate what it is.

Review: Panopticon – Roads to the North

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Two years removed, Kentucky has left a unique long-term impression in my mind. For all of the excitement over an authentic and well-crafted mingling of traditional Appalachian folk and black metal–the term “blackgrass” got tossed around a lot–I honestly don’t remember how most of the songs went. This is because Kentucky‘s message managed to trump its sound. I remember the old man talking about organizing strikes against the coal company. I remember Sarah Ogan Gunning’s boldly defiant calls to overthrow capitalism. I think of settlers slaughtering Indians, mountains blown into dust, rivers running black with pollution, grim-faced miners broken in body but never in spirit, a modern generation abandoning everything their ancestors worked so hard to accomplish… That is my memory of Kentucky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-q1RURXusI

Chase the Grain

I can’t detach myself from Kentucky enough to appreciate Roads to the North as an independent entity. That’s probably fine. I had never heard of Panopticon before Austin Lunn nailed his bloody heart to his sleeve in 2012, and that identity will persist through my perception so long as it remains true. Roads to the North has no explicit message, no lyrics sheet, no spoken tracks or American folk covers. But it has Kentucky, and because of that every song takes on a deeper, more robust meaning than it might have otherwise.

It would be interesting to know what a folk/black metal fan unfamiliar with Panopticon takes from this album. Does the music alone stand far above and beyond the norm? I like to think it does. The album incorporates some entirely unexpected but highly effective melodic death metal moments, especially in the opening track “The Echoes of a Disharmonic Evensong”. This track also gives us perhaps Lunn’s best incorporation of fiddle directly into black metal to date. “The Long Road Part 2: Capricious Miles” transitions out with a long and enthralling jazzy progressive rock chill reminiscent of mid-era Opeth. The whistle in “Where Mountains Pierce the Sky” sounds nothing like what we’re used to out of the European scenes, harkening instead to a western indigenous sound I have only heard from some obscure Mexican folk metal bands. “The Long Road Part 1: One Last Fire” is an unconventional six minute acoustic bluegrass piece that feels more like something straight out of Lunn’s imagination than Appalachia.

The intensity hops around so suddenly that Roads to the North may feel disjointed at first, but the stark contrasts are never forced. Because you don’t always see them coming, they are striking rather than cliche. Lunn performs each of the album’s myriad instruments better than a lot of people who specialize in only one, and there aren’t many producers on the black metal market that can compare to Colin Marston. He has a knack for subtlety that is hard to come by in the scene. I absolutely love the way the tremolo emerges around 30 seconds into “Chase the Grain”, for instance. It’s so soft that you feel its effect on the song as a whole long before your brain consciously recognizes it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSlCWhbKorM

Norwegian Nights

But I suppose I don’t really care about the finer musical details of Roads to the North, and that is why I found this album so difficult to review. This music is only a gateway. Like an engaging book, you never notice that it is well written. Roads to the North is not the guided tour we found on Kentucky. It leaves us be to explore where the feelings take us within the context of the world Lunn has already shown us. Those paths can be rocky. It’s not the glorified past of so many European pagan metallers. The should-be eternal is tainted. The land is marred. It’s the introspective melancholy Americana of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, and your heart goes out to so many things that you can never hope to save.

“Lie beneath a cold blanket and watch the mountains sleep. The train rolls by every hour, as I wake and dream. The woods and the hills–faces so dear to me. Frozen lakes, flatland snow, where I’m called I’ll go. Such still quiet, then the whistle echoes. My fragile sleep torn from me, as many other things will be.”

Review: Cormorant – Earth Diver

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Cormorant are a 4-piece San Francisco Bay band formed in 2007. They released their third studio album, Earth Diver, back in April of this year. Lacking major ties to any other band I have heard of, it’s probably no surprise that they stayed off my radar until now, but this is a band that definitely deserves some attention. Their well-crafted mix of folk, progressive rock, post-rock, and black metal sets a high standard at the cutting edge of metal today. While Earth Diver may possess a fatal flaw, it offers a world of potential that few bands can hope to realize.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqevYzJrhks

Cormorant – Daughter of Void, from Earth Diver

Earth Diver opens with “Eris”, a two and a half minute instrumental folk guitar track with a bit of a Spanish flare. As nice as the song sounds in and of itself, I am not convinced that it was the ideal choice for their opener. The second track, “Daughter of Void”, kicks off acoustic as well, and with the two tracks combined, the intro just seems a bit overdrawn. Don’t worry though; that’s the last time I’ll be complaining about the album’s structure. The acoustic portion of “Daughter of Void” sets the stage nicely and gets us straight to the point without much delay, kicking the metal side of the song off theatrically. We start with a nice metal groove lacking any of the repetitiveness you might expect from a band with the “black” tag, and at two minutes their prog tendencies start to show. Black metal vocals give way to something reminiscent of Opeth or Mastodon, and the song shifts through a variety of genre norms without really breaking from the overall feel. The song hits a peak at 4:05 with an Amorphis-esque vocal melody and a really catchy rhythmic hook. The bending tremolo behind the vocals starting at 5:35 is sick, and they build on it further at 6:25. The song is just packed with little standout moments that never last long enough to seem like overkill. (The youtube video ends early, but you’re only missing eight seconds.)

This is the sort of track you could easily remember from start to finish, if you could get in to it enough to care. If. The down side to “Daughter of Void” is a fairly mediocre production job that fails to really pull me in. I can hear everything clearly enough, but I can’t really feel it. They are going for classic low-key grit over big, booming sounds, and I get that, but it feels pretty washed out. The sort of sound Agalloch accomplished with Ronn Chick on Pale Folklore could have pushed this song from above average to outstanding.

Funny fact I didn’t realize until I wrote this: Cormorant actually do share some production history with Agalloch. They work with Justin Weis, who did a notoriously shitty job on Marrow of the Spirit. Go figure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoeqDqIvqwQ

Cormorant – Sold as a Crow, from Earth Diver

“Sold as a Crow” has a very different feel about it. We kick off with some delicious post-black metal. A pretty tremolo melody warps into a desperate cry as the distortion and blast beats kick into gear. The snare does not always feel quite on point with the guitar, but Lev Weinstein might just have me spoiled in that department. This is the kind of black metal I live for. I love the single-beat stop at 1:46 and 2:00. I love the harmony at 1:50 and 2:05. I love the octave shift at 1:52. I love the three seconds of guitar flare at 1:55. This constant barrage of subtle nuances tends to distinguish post-black metal from its ancestor, and it’s the reason I can recall every note of a 15-minute Krallice composition while an Immortal track might fade into the back of my mind in seconds.

At 2:36 the main melody returns with a sort of flowing, jazzy feel, and then the majority of the song repeats. We get some new variation at 4:03 as build-up to a minute of soloing to close out the track. Maybe because the ending doesn’t appeal to me quite as readily, the production of the album starts to eat at me again. It still feels a bit of a wash, lacking depth or crispness without a good reason. I can appreciate “Sold as a Crow”. I can love listening attentively to every note from every instrument, especially in the first two and a half minutes. But I’m left without that desire to hear it again, right goddamn now. I can never listen to a whole Krallice album at once, because I always get stuck on a track and set it to repeat ad nauseam. “Sold as a Crow” could have been a song like that, but its beautiful structure is not matched by compelling tonal quality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi1XiAg0XDs

Cormorant – Broken Circle, from Earth Diver

What you’re not going to hear on Earth Diver is more of the same. This isn’t the sort of album where I can describe two or three tracks and feel like I’ve summed the collective up well. Every song is a masterfully complex beast unto its own. With Opeth always on the tip of my tongue, peppered by Amorphis, Agalloch, and Krallice, Cormorant manage to remind me of a lot of the most unique bands in metal without ever paralleling any of them for long or losing its own unique flavor. “Broken Circle” has jazzy acoustic guitar a la My Arms Your Hearse Opeth, straight-up in-your-face black metal, a break to a distinct Orchid-era Opeth sound at 3:29, brief allusions to math rock, and a world in between. When the singer isn’t barking in classic black metal fashion, he might be pulling off his best Pasi Koskinen or Mikael Åkerfeldt impression, letting out a bellowing roar, or even shouting at the top of his lungs (2:04). You can often catch the bass running wild, sounding especially like Johan De Farfalla during the Orchid moment (why oh why did Mikael fire that man?). But as many band references as I can throw out there, the majority of “Broken Circle” sounds like Cormorant’s own unique creation.

And yet. And yet I can’t pull this album in and hold it close for long. What struck me as mediocre production from the start begins to feel like a travesty in the face of such absolutely brilliant compositions. This album was robbed of its well-deserved glory by a quality of sound that totally ostracizes me. I keep cranking the volume up louder and louder, hoping that I am just not experiencing it immersively enough to feel the pull. But it’s never there. Oh, it doesn’t sound half as bad as the transcoded garbage you’re hearing in these youtube samples. It would be fine for an average, run-of-the-mill album. But Earth Diver is not that. It deserved above-average attentiveness–something carefully crafted to showcase their sound in all of its uniqueness. I can’t help but think that if Colin Marston had gotten his hands on this raw potential it would have been molded into the best album of 2014.