renate/cordate – S/T
Blame us for the length of time this one took. We can’t pin it on the old editor for this particular review because though this one came in another one of his mysterious boxes of “WTF where did you hide this stuff?”, this new editor speaking to you now looked at this particular album, said “yeah, probably some indie rock crap,” and immediately placed it in the “maybe someday if I’m not annoyed” pile. Forgive me, renate/cordate, but it was the rhyme pattern of your name that kept me away. It just seemed too hip. It sounded like the name of a dress company that sells skirts for $180 at Anthropologie made out of burlap and covered in $12 buttons. Something about it just didn’t sound like what the Deaf Sparrow needs. Sometimes the Deaf Sparrow is wrong. Damn this human tendency to judge things at face value, look what it has done to us! To purge ourselves of our own filth we stared at the cover for a long while, since the art is meant to seem like its blurred, almost like looking at a 3D comic without the glasses. So we stared, and stared, and stared some more as the music began. Then, it was discovered, listening to these guys is a new form of drug. Previous to this no one ever believed me when I told them I never touched anything my entire life, I’ve never even been drunk, but perhaps after listening to renate/cordate I should say “yes, I’ve done some stuff,” symbolically speaking.
“The Climb” starts it off, and it’s recommended you stare at the art just like we did to slowly get the feel. Because once it’s going, they carry you the entire way through, and in many ways it’s a musical crack dealer. For a band that totally ignores vocals, at this for this release, this S/T has got a surprising amount to offer without an ounce of regret. Hailing from Finland, renate/cordate take the typical current of most bands of their kind, and they’re quite humble about it. Humble in the sense that they like to think of themselves as carrying the typical influence list of bands like Neurosis, Sun O))), and similar acts, but really it’s more like they listen to that stuff when they’re not playing their own thing. Don’t be so humble, guys, it’s probably better off listing yourselves as your own influence from now on.
renate/cordate develops several interesting layers of sound, and the shoegaze element is what enables them to avoid vocals and turn it into something cosmically incredible. Most bands of the doom variety, whatever genre or subgenre you choose, require a lead to keep things fresh. In order to do it without one, well, that requires carrying the listener into vast expanses of sound where the mind has something to investigate regardless of how many times you listen to it. Really the only drag track here is the third, but the rest rip your ventricles into piece. Take for example the second track, “Calumet”, which moves through an acoustic landscape of astral sounds and then suddenly at around the 4:20 mark (intentional?) the musical marijuana kicks in and you’re riding an abandoned space capsule straight for the center of Jupiter to be covered in clouds of ammonia rain. For those of us who denied ourselves the supposed higher states of reality via narcotics, this S/T blasts the brain without the permanent nerve damage afterwards. You come out of this one high as a meteorite, but as mentally stable as a child who’s never witnessed death. Stellar work, looking forward to what these guys do in the future, and this time it’s not simply a sentence to end on.
renate/cordate Official Facebook
Written by Stanley Stepanic
renate/cordate – S/T
Self-Released
4.5 / 5
