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I
know
people shit themselves at the mere mention of Pelican
and Isis. I know that the release of their recordings
throw skinny metalheads into a frenzy of Beatles-like
proportions. Or well, for underground metal standards
anyway. Those two American groups have managed to stir
quite the pot of beans. They have been cooking it slowly
and even though in hindsight, it may seem like their
best recording’s are already way behind, their momentum
has never ceased. I have been largely unaffected by
either. A few years ago I saw Isis live. They were as
much fun as watching people paint a mansion white.
Surely, theirs is the deep kind of music, the one that
emerges slowly and that requires certain degree of
contribution from the listener, but to me, openers These
Arms Are Snakes were truly vibrant and stole the show.
There are
other foreign counterparts that make music with the same flavor
and with similar potency and that don’t get the same
recognition. A few years ago Gallic nutsos Year of No Light
released a gorgeous record titled Nord. It got a bunch of
good reviews and that was that. Since, they’ve had four splits
with fairly unknown bands and a live album, none of which have
received much coverage. Ausserwelt is only their second full
length of original material and it features a black and white
photo of a tiny island for a cover.
I mention
that because as I listen to Ausserwelt I can’t stop thinking
about maritime motifs. I shit you not, this is like music for
whales or dolphins. This is metal as interpreted by Flipper or
Shamu. Ausserwelt shall be a soundtrack for one of those
Natural Geographic documentaries about unscrupulous fishermen,
or it should have been used as a curtain close to the award
winning documentary The Cove. Year of No Light don’t play metal,
they make natural post rock, dramatic after metal. The dude in charge of
the electronics, keyboards, etc, especially him, is elsewhere,
like dolphins, he clicks, whistles and bursts.
There are
four songs in this record. They are all cut from the same cloth.
And they all spend their combined 48 minutes apparently building
momentum; Neur-Isis drums (read tribal and metal) sustaining the
whole thing and never arriving to a steady beat. Meanwhile
layers of prepotence offer distortion in minor measure to
ethereal wail-like sounds that surmount to the call of the wild.
Ausserwelt sounds like great soundtrack music, it sounds awesome
when it doesn’t take center stage nor requires our full
attention. But in the foreground and as a whole, one comes to
notice that it builds to no end, and like a joke with no
punchline, it never delivers.
Official Site
MySpace
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