I've finished my masters dissertation! Here's an incredibly irritating gif to celebrate!
With that party atmosphere created I'd like to totally ruin it by reviewing a slow-paced, introspective post-metal album, in an introspective and slow-paced way.
Year of No Light are a French band from Bordeaux, originally with a sludgy vocal-driven sound. However, they parted ways with their vocalist, added a guitarist and a second drummer and decided to move in a more post-metal direction.
The result of this lineup change is the mysterious and utterly enthralling Ausserwelt. A sprawling, atmospheric 4-track instrumental album spanning over 45 minutes, this is not an album for people who lose patience with long songs, or indeed slow songs. The tracks here take a while to pick up pace, but for good reason. Once Year of No Light get the juggernaut rolling, the result is a thundering wall-of-sound which envelops the listener like an icy fog, and the behemoth-style impact is all the more forceful for the slow build ups. Keeping the track listing to a minimal 4 allows the band to make the album a whole experience for the listener; it all works extremely well together. The album artwork, monochrome and moody, is a perfect fit for the music, and with the band giving what I hope are tongue-in-cheek jobs for themselves in the credits (for example, "funeral hermeneutics" or "electrical geometry") the scene is set for a deep, dark album.
"Nope, we don't know what 'heavy cosmogony' is either.
But it sounds cool, doesn't it?"
The first tracks are two parts of the same piece (suite? concerto? it's hard to tell with these things) named after the Greek goddess of the underworld Persephone. Beginning with faint strains of organ and feed-backing guitars, a shimmer of cymbals sets off the highly textured guitars, laying down powerfully melancholy riffs; tremolo picking abounds here, but not in an indistinct black-metal way. The heavy bass sections play off wonderfully with eerie guitar lines. Cymbals crash and almost sound like they're about to shatter throughout the heavier sections giving the track a shimmering quality, like mirages over a storm at sea. When the track suddenly drops pace, it makes way for a titanic doom-laden breakdown, all the while the guitars shimmering and gliding overhead, which is just joy to behold. Part one of Persephone, called in parentheses Enna, is a mournful track, almost with a sense of grief, but with a thunderous quality, like it is mirroring some natural cataclysm.
Part 2, Coré merges in perfectly as the feedback and organ-like drone at the end of Enna and fades into a pounding of what sound like war-drums, which punctuate with all the more force due to the double-percussion setup used. The guitars provide a textural fuzz and crackle over the top, as a melodic line more ominous than in Enna and an unashamedly doom-metal influenced chord progression cut through. If the last track was a cataclysm tearing through the land, this is the armies of the dead reclaiming it. Yet the feel here isn't the corny old doom we might expect, the shimmering, enveloping sound still pervades everything, making the melancholy atmosphere seem less "evil" and more inevitable, natural, awe-inspiring. This kind of post-metal tries to evoke the sublime; the awesome beauty of disaster. A spidery guitar line intersects the doomy riff, unsettling in slow-paced discord, yet utterly transfixing. When listening to Coré at its most intense you can almost hear rocks crashing and crumbling into a turbulent sea around you.
Coré melts away with a glimmer, but the peace only lasts for a second until the threatening fuzzy riffage of Hiérophante thrusts the listener straight into the underworld itself. Ausserwelt is German for "otherworld" and this album does feel oddly alien, like you have been transported to a place where destruction and calamity happen on a scale never before seen. The multi-layered riffing makes way for a faster, more treble-laden section, which always makes me think of river rapids, ending in a waterfall of terrifying proportions, as the thick guitars stomp back onto the scene like titans. The ever present and relentless drumming adds urgency and tension to the track and it eventually builds up to an almighty maelstrom of sound. All instruments speed up electrifyingly until it all ends abruptly to bow out in diffuse drones.
Basically it's like this, but with less gospel music.
The final track, Abbesse is the culmination of everything that came before. Strangely chilled out, yet eerie tremolo guitars open the track, before being drowned out in an epic giant-paced riff, which speeds up to include the tremolo of before, before it all arrives at a piercing and almost regal sounding melody, as if the royal court of the underworld were in procession. This, however, is cut short with threatening minor chords (what else?) which build up to a an almost animalistic release, as if some gigantic mythical creature were in the throes of death. The shrill cries of the guitars sound melancholy and fearful. The drums pound to new levels of intensity, the double-kit setup allowing for almost chaotic sounding percussion over the increasingly hellish guitars. The energy has to give out sometime and with a crash it ends; a gentle feedback-based melody fades the album out.
In short then, Ausserwelt is melancholy, epic, mysterious, intense, awe-inspiring, enveloping and extremely cohesive. It's genuinely one of the best post-metal albums out there and I think it's a game-changer. The obvious influences from doom and black metal improve and are improved by the pacing and structure of the songs and the whole atmosphere is ominous, even a little scary, but sublime. Many listeners may be put off by the slow-paces, the oppressive atmosphere, the frequent use of feedback to end tracks and the lack of vocals, but for me it's an amazing musical experience and should be considered as important to post-metal as Isis's Oceanic or Cult of Luna's Salvation. Buy this album, stick on your headphones and enter another world.
I leave you with a live recording of Persephone. Watch for the duel drums, they're mesmerising to watch. Year of No Light are due to record another album next year and I cannot wait.
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