The irony of brutal death metal exclusively themed around
torture. Mercifully this one is short and painlessly inoffensive, barely a
half-hour of snare-slapping and mucous-clearing. Festival of Death is another self-mutilating victim to the
recording mimicry of heavy-volume voice and drum; blinding white light blurs.
Weirdly ambient. Impressive drummer on those
snare hits; THAT takes endurance. Hey, heard a tom maybe once or twice! Critique
unsurprisingly interchangeable with most on the blood-and-guts front.
Praise be to Michael Gira, whose name slant rhymes with “my
hero.” The only musician sane enough to mug madness in its maw as the world around
him rots with sophomoric protocol. His lack of compromise through thirty years
of determined incubation now hatches the penultimate climax of every Swans
paragon, The Seer, an album with
both patience and inevitability not unlike steamrollers. There are extracts:
the grinding steel-mill repetitions of Filth
and Children of God, the
face-to-mirror self-scolding of White
Light, and the scattered banging of haunted fireworks that is Soundtracks for the Blind, all of which
are swallowed by the hulking prominence of The
Seer and its ambitious, majestic two-hour span, seeming to forget names and
meanings, operating through cores rather than itemizations (I see it all). Songs
are secondary to ideas here, peculiar percussion jackhammering waypoints for
strummed and slaughtered strings, vocals not of a foreign tongue, but of a
foreign life, everything totaling into lumbering, freakish mammoths for tracks:
three of which combine for 70 minutes. Deceptively NOT boring, but passionate and demanding, as each punctuation note in the minimalism that is
the bursting middle of the title track (the only 32-minute thing I’ll ever like)
is a necessary tally mark. The orchestration in each explosion is tremendous,
quantities of drums accompanied by woodwinds, cellos, pipes, chimes, harmonicas,
orchestras of dissonance finding singularity in existence. Utterly
indescribable with words, labels, or tonality, yet ardently recommended for its unchartered
prose, which Gira narrates with courage amidst age (late 50’s at time of
release), frustration, and sobering recall: pained wisdom expressed by an
individualist in universal concepts, older than earth, known by anything green
or with pulse.
Long, boring album. Meshuggah is perfectly capable of
blistering face-melters like the None
EP and Destroy Erase Improve. Even Nothing had something. Catch 33 is mid-paced, riff-less
quandary: mere theme-and-variation play on atonal doodling courtesy of Fredrik Thordenal
(who solos little here, or if he does, it matters little), usually for several
minutes. Polyrhythmic, but not bewildering, with no hook and no headbangers. When
the record eventually crescendos and teases metal sensibility, all music comes to
an abrupt halt to make room for baffling breaks filled with whisper talk,
ambient cybernetic noise, and chorus-pedal guitar effects. I loathe this. Really, the
not-so-special defects of Sol Niger
Within becoming too prominent on an album charged forward through severe
self-concussive stubbornness. Damn. They were once so cutting edge.
