Deafheaven: "Sunbather"

The house mottoes of Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire make excellent micro-reviews: House Stark’s “Winter is coming,” for example, nicely sums up Agalloch’s Marrow of the Spirit and the Lannisters’ “Hear me roar” tells you what you need to know about what Caro Tanghe is doing on Oathbreaker’s Eros/Anteros. Deafheaven’s Sunbather, then, is House Waxley’s “Light in Darkness.”

The opposites of light and darkness immediately find an analogy in the contrast between the album’s decidedly “un-metal” artwork and the onslaught of blast beats and black metal screams that sets in 47 seconds into the first song. That Sunbather will polarize listeners probably fits this duality. There has been quite some hype about this album and I’m sure it will not only show up in a lot of best-of-the-year lists in December, but also in some most-overrated/overhyped lists. I’d put it in the first category, though. Sunbather is a genre bender between black metal, post-rock, and field recordings that mixes Wolves in the Throne Room, Envy, and Mogwai and that is as uplifting as it is devastating.

The discussions of genre and genre rules provoked by the album are not only intensified by interviews like this one, in which guitarist Kerry McCoy jokingly refers to themselves as “the Hugh Grant in Notting Hill of metal,” but also by the fact that singer George Clarke looks like Bayern Munich’s midfielder Toni Kroos: potential son-in-law rather than corpse paint. Now don’t let that fool you: there is not much playing nice in the lyrics or in the mood of Sunbather.  The guiding motif for the album is the image of a sunbathing girl in a wealthy suburb who triggers all kinds of dark, regretful, and destructive thoughts and emotions in the observer: “I watched you lay on a towel in grass that exceeded the height of your legs. I gazed into reflective light. I cried against an ocean of light.” The lyrics and their delivery as unintelligible shrieks are both gut-wrenching and very intense. That a sunbathing girl leads someone to recording these kinds of screams will probably be considered fucking insane by the majority of mainstream listeners, but it confronts us with the true amount of pain experienced by the narrator: “In the room full of family, but couldn’t find one. In the hallways lit up brightly, but couldn’t find myself. I laid drunk on the concrete on the day of your birth in celebration of all you were worth. I am my father’s son. I am no one. I cannot love. It’s in my blood,” Clarke screams in “The Pecan Tree” and I’m reminded of Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 movie Festen (The Celebration). Watch that movie, and you’ll look into a similar abyss.

The music is, non-surprisingly, also full of contrasts. Contemplative and quite beautiful instrumental passages collide with blast beats, tremolo picking, and shrieks that will make your hairs stand up. At times, this is absolutely exhilarating: what happens between minutes four and five in “Vertigo” may just be the best thing I’ve heard all year. The way it changes from solemn postrock into a Coheed-and-Cambria-style guitar solo only to lead into blast beats and black metal shrieking is nothing short of amazing. Once the drums shift down a gear, the song changes to a part where George Clarke’s wails sound like a demon trapped in your bathroom (a demon who’s been raising hell in there for hours and who’s getting a little exhausted now). The song ends with wall-of-sound guitars accompanied by Clarke’s screams – a combination that sounds like he is carrying the weight of the world. The pain and loneliness becomes almost palpable here. It’s super epic and done masterfully.

What I find most interesting about this is how it plays with our expectations and what it has to teach us about our preconceptions. It makes us take a step back and think about the connection between images and music. How the cover design, band photos, logo, etc. influence our reading or listening. Perhaps it even makes us question why we listen to certain kinds of music. By taking a genre that is very much determined by genre conventions – musically and image-wise – and dissolving it into something entirely different, Deafheaven is quite iconoclastic. Sunbather thus may remind us of the inherent contradiction of iconoclastic genres developing their own orthodoxy: when genres that oppose tradition (political, religious, musical, etc.) create their own rules and traditions that then have to be followed. Sunbather is music detached from ideology – and that’s pretty refreshing. It’s not often that albums like that come along.


Here's a video of the recording process.
Their Facebook page.
Deafheaven on Bandcamp.

The Ocean: "Pelagial"

Ambitious as always, German-Swiss prog-/post-metal band The Ocean’s new album Pelagial is published simultaneously as an instrumental and a non-instrumental version.  Musically and conceptually, The Ocean stick to what they have been doing:  dense concept albums whose song titles, general idea, and artwork form an artistic whole that speaks equally to the brain and the guts: giving you something to think about while repeatedly punching you in the stomach. The main idea of Pelagial is a journey from the surface of the ocean to its bottom, a musical trip that gets darker, slower, and more oppressive as we descend through the various oceanic layers. Originally, the album was meant to be recorded without vocals, but the recovery of singer Loic Rossetti from vocal cord problems or something led to his return/addition to the recording process, so that now we have two versions of the album.

The instrumental version lets listeners focus much more on the details: the samples of underwater sounds, the quieter parts with piano, violin, or cello, and the different layers of instrumentation, rhythms, and moods. It's quite impressive – and immediately recognizable as The Ocean, which shows that guitarist Robin Stapp, who led the band from the rather loose collective of various musicians to the fixed line-up they've had since 2010, has always had a clear vision of what his band should sound like. Take your time when you listen to this, there is a lot to discover – the increase in pressure signaled by the relentless drumming of “Bathyalpelagic III: Disequilibrated,” for example, the cold and lonely guitar in “Abyssopelagic II: Signals of Anxiety” that turns into something triumphant as the song progresses, or the sense of Otherness in the lead guitar melodies in “Bathyalpelagic III: Disequilibrated” and “Demersal: Cognitive Dissonance.”

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of listening to the vocal version first, so my first few encounters with the instrumental one felt like listening to a Karaoke CD. Once I got over that and tried to follow the descending-into-the-depth theme, I had another issue. I couldn’t help but think about a thing we did in my Italian class not too long ago: our teacher gave us several sentences that we had to put in order so they’d get increasingly rude (to prepare us for real life in Italy, I guess). We did this with a couple of situations (someone parked stupidly so you couldn’t leave with your car, you’ve been waiting for your pizza for an hour, etc.) and usually I got it all wrong. Apparently my sense of rudeness is different from our teacher’s. I also have the suspicion that my sense of “dark/oppressive/heavy” is different from The Ocean’s – because I’m pretty sure that doing a similar excercise with Pelagial – playing the songs in random order and trying to arrange them in a way I think they portray the journey into the deep – would lead to the same result: my oceanic layers would be all over the place. Try it with your friends and see what happens.

I recommend listening to the instrumental version first and then see what Rosetti does with the songs. The vocals not only add another metaphoric dimension to Pelagial (a journey into the depths of the human psyche), but also make this an entirely different album. It’s interesting how the presence of a singer makes us listen to music in a different way. The songs become more distinct from each other, the build-ups in the songs seem even more epic, and there is an additional point of reference that adds to the emotional range of the songs. Just listen to the two versions of “Mesopelagic: Into the Uncanny”: while the crescendo in the instrumental version is already great, the vocals definitely give it a new urgency. The fact that “down” (in the line “From this point on there is only one direction: down”) is the first screamed word on the album is a very nice touch and makes for an awesome moment. Equally awesome is the juxtaposition of piano and screaming in “Demersal: Cognitive Dissonance” (with guest vocals by Thomas Hallbom of Breach). With Rossetti, who ranges from clean singing to an all-out Aaron-Turner-style roar, the band has become a bit more digestible – even at his most intense screaming he doesn’t sound quite as brutal as the more guttural vocalists on Fluxion, Aeolian, and Precambrian – which adds, I think, to the quality of the songs.

Compared to its immediate predecessors Heliocentric and Anthropocentric, Pelagial seems more homogenous and focused, although it doesn’t really offer any surprises. I wonder if the songs might have been different if they had been written with a vocal track in mind from the get-go. However, the bottom line for me is that – no matter if you buy that whole journey-to-the-bottom-of-the-ocean thing or not – it’s still very fascinating. Concept aside, Pelagial is an album that is ambitious, cerebral, complex, and earth-shattering all at the same time. There is enough on both the instrumental and the vocal version to stand on their own, but it’s great to be able to go back and forth between both. Depending on your mood, you may immerse yourself in multi-layered instrumental metal, listen to more traditional band-with-a-singer songs, or ruin your vocal cords with some serious Karaoke.


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