52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #25

Cynic – Traced In Air

(Season of Mist, 2008)

Buy the album here

I can’t remember first noticing Cynic or even hearing them for the first time, but with Traced In Air I have reason to never forget them.  Existing somewhere in the space formed by an equilateral triangle between Tool, Mars Volta, and Gorguts, Cynic are sensually lush, at times complex, and powerfully melodic.  Traced In Air is equally effective patiently building sparse soundscapes or dynamically layering instrumentation in self-propelled, existential, proto-death prog.  It’s an album that completely changed my understanding of heavy music, the place of death metal style vocals in other settings, and the conceptual limits of lyrics in heavy music.

“The Unknown Guest” is a perfect example.  Rolling in on the faded-in, reborn rhythms of “Integral Birth”, laced with Sanskrit mantras, backed by vicious death growls, and bearing beautiful, transitional passages of delicate light in amongst the tightly packed riffing and fill-heavy drumlines of the verses, “The Unknown Guest” takes us on an exploration of how spiritual discovery can reinvigorate physical life.  “Adam’s Murmur” introduces yet more stylistic experimentation with near robotic vocals that contrast the chakras-inspired contemplation of man’s creation.  It’s a bold decision to express these ideas in such “synthetic” ways, but the delicacy of the delivery along with the balancing earthiness of the backing vocal allows the song to hit its mark.  “King of Those Who Know” also balances these synthetic sounds with clean guitar tones and death growls to produce an equally vicious and soothing take on spiritual awareness.  Stretches of layered vocals, rolling double bass drumming, and skilfully picked riffs pack the idea-filled verses and choruses to the brim in order that the near-empty bridge sections and lulls are near-necessitated moments of quiet contemplation.  The thoughts inspired by this music come thick and fast but Cynic also want to provide you with the space and time to consider how you’ve received them and how you might turn them back out in to the world.

Discussing individual tracks is difficult though as the enduring image of this record is of a musically and thematically unified concept of human existence deftly and confidently scrawled, like the light reaching from star to star in a night sky.  Much like Blast Tyrant from last week’s post, this is music that will have your head in the clouds, feeling weightless, carried away, and disappointed to have to come back down.  The light musical touch combined with the intellectual weight of centuries old philosophical thought creates a welcoming yet challenging expression of humanity’s place in the cosmos.  It simultaneously makes humanity seem insignificant in the scope of the universe yet intensely meaningful and unique.  Songs like “Adam’s Murmur” and “Evolutionary Sleeper” put contemporary humanity on a gigantic spectrum of evolutionary science while also acknowledging the philosophical and existential impact of spirituality and religious beliefs in our creation.  In delivering this balanced message, Cynic explore the full extent of their skills as musicians.  Each song is crafted from a diverse palette where little seems off limits.  Vocal distortion is frequently used alongside noteworthy guitar pedal combinations to create incredible audio effects that somehow feel organic and electronic at the same time, like the firing of synapses.  Paul Masvidal and Tymon Kruidenier trade clean vocals and death growls, and Amy Correia provides moments of gentle, background melody, while the guitars skilfully switch from delicate untouched tones to distorted metal brutality.  The rhythm duo of Sean Reinert and Sean Malone pack a lot of work in to short passages, providing attention-grabbing rumbling foundations, while also delicately accenting the quieter moments. 

Two of these quieter moments bookend the entire album.  “Nunc Fluens” and “Nunc Stans” are two interpretations of existence and the “eternal”: the former is the flow of time and there being no beginning or end, the latter understands that all things are now and that there is no past or future.  While Cynic may have intended something greater or more specifically spiritual with this structure, for me Traced In Air is a beautiful reminder of how we should listen to and experience music.  Much like the yoga that seems to have inspired “The Space for This”, the record is about channelling our focus, filtering out distractions, and giving our all to what we are experiencing now.  By giving ourselves completely to the moment, to the music, to the experience, we are closer to ourselves, more open to other possibilities, and ready to accept ideas that challenge our beliefs.  Heavy metal might not seem like the most likely place for this line of thought, but in embracing spirituality, science, simplicity, complexity, melody, and brutality Cynic have crafted an album that is all things at once, while somehow more focused than most other music.  Traced In Air teaches us that music can surprise, usurp established norms, and live on in how we approach and understand our existence. 

52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #29

Gojira – From Mars to Sirius

(Listenable Records, 2005)

Buy the album here

Godzilla is a gigantic monster.  Whales are huge mammals.  The distance from Mars to Sirius is unimaginably great.  Gojira somehow manages to make sounds that seem larger than all these things.  Theirs is a crushingly heavy yet uplifting sound that holds a contemplative beauty in its brutality.  From Mars to Sirius is an album that will make you feel like a colossus astride the globe, Joe Duplantier’s roars flowing through your veins, but invigorated by a protective sense of belonging to its creatures, resources, and potential.  The heaviness, the deep growled and screamed vocals, the death metal-inspired drums, and thick, equal parts doom/death guitars place Gojira as one of the more extreme bands in mainstream heavy metal.  While heavy metal has often dealt with feelings of isolation, Gojira want us to see that we’re all part of the same ecology, and that we all have a part to play in keeping it alive… even if their music is devastating to all that stand in its path.

Extreme metal tends to engender assumptions.  These can range from the obvious stereotype of thuggish guys peddling mindless noise, to the belief that death metal vocals can be about nothing other than violence.  And while there are plenty of bands throwing their hands high in the air to proudly lay claim to those stereotypes, Gojira show us the other side of extreme music where heaviness, aggression, and loudness are about caring deeply for something, bringing people together, and hoping to be a force for positive change.  In fact, Gojira are at their most effective when their heaviness is more natural or seemingly incidental, as if just an extension of their feelings on the subject.  The Way of all Flesh, the follow up to From Mars..., struggles to produce the same emotional connection simply because it is hitting its listeners too hard.  But here we have incredible moments of heaviness on “From The Sky”, “Where Dragons Dwell”, and “Flying Whales” that never overstep, never impede your emotional connection, and never cease the spine tingling feeling that inspires you to hug everyone and simultaneously kick holes in the wall.  Gojira do what all good heavy metal bands should do: bludgeon you around the ears and make you smile about it.

For many, From Mars… would have been their first Gojira listening experience, but looking back, it’s incredible to note how much of a leap forward in songwriting, performance, and production the album represents.  While the moments of djent-inspired complexity and bruising vocals are all present on their earlier albums, they lack the individuality and ear for hooks and doom heaviness that allows them to stand apart on this and later albums.  The opening track “Ocean Planet” introduces the running theme of the album with gentle whale song, and instantly displays a newfound confidence in their unique identity with riffs built around brutal repeated breakdowns and pinched harmonics, and lyrics preoccupied with the interweaving of nature and human consciousness.  “Backbone” does similar work with a more free-flowing, high tempo approach, blastbeats, expansive guitar sounds, and extended vocal growls.  It’s an attention-grabbing opening salvo filled with diverse sounds, textures, and emotions.  Oddly, having grown up on 90s metal like Machine Head and Fear Factory, Gojira give me a little of everything I’m looking for from heavy music: big guitar sounds, ferocious vocals, double bass pedal action, and loads of pinched harmonics, but with enough hook and melody for me to latch on to.  The main difference being that Gojira wrap it up in the theme of nature and spirituality, so while they’re making you feel like a mean, bad-ass… you’re a caring, mean, bad-ass.

Back-to-back tracks “From Mars” and “To Sirius” take us on an abbreviated journey from the former’s gentle, whispered prelude to the enormous, adrenaline-pumping genius of the latter’s opening riff.  Gojira’s ability to take a simple riff and make it feel epic with the infusion of Mario Duplantier’s intense double-bass led drumming, and the elongated vowels of brother Joe’s death vocals is unmatched in metal right now.  At times Joe Duplantier’s cries are like sheet lightning flashing across the sky, leaving only the memory of its existence before the thunder and depth of his death growl comes to remind you of its power.  “The Heaviest Matter in the Universe” and “Global Warming” are the high points of an album that has not a single bad song.  The former is a pit-starting, thrash-death masterpiece that briefly toys with being too heavy before punishing you with the catchiest song about mental and spiritual anguish you’re likely to hear.  The latter closes out the album with a beautiful, diverse, and rich prog-death culmination of the thematic threads introduced with “Ocean Planet”.  Gojira wear their hearts on their sleeves here, unafraid to proclaim a sense of powerlessness in the face of human arrogance and wastefulness:

We are taking everything for granted
I don't think we should do this now
And when I see the smoke all around
I feel like I'm not

From humankind down there
I feel like glaciers are my eyes
And mountains are my head
My heart is ocean
And I feel all alone
Because everybody's wrong

But they are a positive and forward-thinking group so never let go of hope:

I had this dream, our planet surviving
The guiding stars always growing
And all the worlds
The fates all the countries
They're all rebuilding at the same time
I never fell and always believed in
We could evolve and get older
Open your eyes and let all this flow
Now see a new hope is growing inside

From Mars… is a perfect unit.  Nothing stands out too far, there is nothing that doesn’t belong.  It is focused and aggressive, but confident enough to explore and experiment.  It is unendingly catchy, but has enough depth to have you interested in new ways on every return.  Gojira have, in making an album about the dangers the earth faces, channelled their frustration, hopes, and desires into a timeless piece of music.  It has all the sonic qualities that suggest it will age well, and, even 12 years on, it is as vibrant and modern as it was on its release.  I hope, as I imagine the band do, that the album’s warnings of irreversible damage to the planet don’t prove to be as timeless as I think the music itself will.  Let the warnings be heard.

52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #44

Steve Von Till – If I Should Fall to the Field

(Neurot Recordings, 2002)

Buy the album here

Steve Von Till is a teacher, a father, and a musician. In listening to his second solo album, If I Should Fall to the Field, it is important to recognise his place in the world, in his family, and in his art. For his folk songs express not only his reverence for art and music, but also the concept of lineage, both cultural and familial. Von Till ponders, in his writing, in the choices of songs he covers, and in the tone and imagery he employs, how he has received these musical traditions, but also his standing in his family history, and what he may leave for coming generations. As a guitarist and vocalist of Neurosis, he has become one of the most influential artists in the hardcore, post-rock, and post-metal sub-genres, releasing more than ten crucial albums for fans of this music since 1990. However, it is in his solo work that we come to know the heart of the man, the passions that drive him, and the things he holds dear. It is a moving piece of music: a family heirloom, an ode to generations past, and an expression of nature, life, and death all found in the human body.

“To The Field” beautifully encapsulates this permanence of human life through a connection to nature and the food it provides us: “On my sustaining life,/I will be as yew, with the grain.” It's a message that Von Till seeks to convey with quiet and almost imperceptibly building instrumentation. The gentle acoustic guitar introduction is joined by his sonorous voice, before electric guitars, organ, and drums gather to burst into life with the album's most dramatic crescendo. Warmth and contemplation in his voice are replaced in this moment with an anguished, wordless wailing that feel as if carried on the changing winds mentioned in the opening of the song. It's a song that contemplates human death feeding the earth, and in that way finding eternal life. This sentiment finds its partner in “This River” where “dreams were washed out to sea”, and “blood like fuel is fed to the fire”; and a similar wordless outro carries us on waters that flow to “the edge of the earth”. In these songs human life seeps in to the earth and in to the waters, feeding nature and finding permanence and renewal. The untempered expressiveness shown in these crescendoes is rare on an album that otherwise exercises restraint, preferring to allow the simple instrumentation, rich vocals, and dark, poetic lyrics pull us in to its contemplative atmosphere.

Von Till is clearly contemplating his place in the folk tradition. For hundreds of years folk songs have been passed from generation to generation through performance, re-writing, and re-recording. The authors of many of these songs remain unknown, but respect is shown to the traditions of folk music by artists who find new ways to perform old songs, or old songs to convey new thoughts. By including a beautiful cover of Neil Young's “Running Dry” and a fiddle-heavy rendition of traditional folk song “Am I Born To Die”, he inserts himself in to a folk tradition that is simultaneously looking back for inspiration, grounding, and belonging and reaching forward to the next generation, offering them this rich history. Von Till's “Am I Born To Die” carries with it, in his tortured and strained voice, the weight of the history it has seen, and for some reason has always reminded me of “America the Beautiful”.

At its heart, the history this album presents is one of family, of belonging, and of acknowledging the sacrifices of previous generations. As such, “Hallowed Ground” and “The Harpy” are its emotional core, portraying Von Till's admiration for both nature and his forefathers. The two seem inextricable on this album, and “Hallowed Ground” is its high point. The beautiful atmospherics reach new heights on this song built around stark imagery, gently repeating acoustic strumming, and punctuating electric guitar. Von Till's deep voice is bold and portentous, filling the song with a sense of impending doom. But it is revealed that this doom is perhaps in the past:

Grandfather's hands bled for us here

Hallowed ground forever.

His admiration for his forefathers has led him to include a recording of his grandfather reading “The Harpy” that was made by his father in 1961. A poem originally written by Robert W. Service in the early twentieth century is read here with the old time, rural feel that has informed the sound of the entire album. While the backing music is almost inaudible, the coming together of three generations of Von Tills is a fitting end to an album that interacts with its traditions, both of folk music and family. The serious, contemplative music of If I Should Fall to the Field inspires a desire to connect with nature, with music history, with other generations of our families, and ultimately to Steve Von Till himself. A teacher, a father, and an incredible musician.