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I’m from the jungle — so floating epic hymns emanating from Aryan, Christian Northerners not only make me a bit scared, but also glad to not be Jewish. Think World War II. Under the scrutiny of Austrian-Jewish intellectuals outta the Frankfurt school, any sweeping, transcendentalising musics that attempted to lift emotions, Romanticism of the artist, Wagner, Stravinsky, would be eviscerated into nothing more than a vicious attempt at wholesale racism. It’s Die Führer music I’m talking about.
It’s the destructive seeds in over-complete music they sought to detect, and I think could be applied to a host of genres emerging decades later even they couldn’t predict, like early, esoteric screamo scenes turning into mass-produced MTV simulacrum. For the record, I am skeptical to a host of these bands identifying with that 2000s sound, slick gigantic Brit guitars, sensitive vocals, read: emo with malignant heaviness, like all the boys who listened to hardcore as teenagers decided to grow-up and become “adults”. I read into it only potentiality for tickling NME’s scrotum. That said, I equally hate reviewers who would pick this album up and write something as totally meaningless as: “this sounds like a cross between Sigur Rós and Elliot Smith”. I mean, what the fuck does that really mean? The same Jewish intellectuals and musicologists who detected the dangerous element of grandiose themes and overwhelmingly idealized choruses — also struggled against gas chambers to the point that volumes were written championing the harsh, atonal, dissonance, contradiction, impossible binds — it is their views against totalizing music that resonates today, and which stemmed from a desire against music’s obliteration.
Nowadays everything’s gotten a bit worse — we live in our comfortable worlds when new music passes like water and pop; foregrounded like wallpaper without us thinking twice. So I’m not really in the mood to tell you what this record sounds like because chances are, if your musical scope begins with Radiohead and ends in Muse you’ll probably listen to this and gizzz your pants. Not to mention any band-comparisons these days usually end up a sticker on some press release, to feed more into some marketing strategy, to feed into someone’s consumption of average, but hot spankin’ new music.
Yet after infinite listens to this record in varying environments I can finally tell you what I’ve gotten outta this record. Positively. Or negatively, if negative = good. I keep returning to one particular song on this album, Track 8, “Ardent Cloud” — it’s the kind of easy listening capable of catching you unaware, be it that drumroll or rhythm, hook or chime, which suddenly takes you over and gives you that propelling-lifting feeling, especially if you’re gaping outside past neutral landscapes. This album sounds professional. This album is almost too well-produced, layer upon layer. This album exhibits impeccable musicianship. All the qualities of my favorite northern Aryan country — proper, complete, full, but never quite enough to save us from any imminent death should music as we know it remain threatened.
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