Welcome to The Harmonic Series, a music review series - exclusive to Steemit - where I’ll be discussing music across many different styles and genres from metal, to electronic music, to jazz and beyond! I’ll be talking up exciting new releases, some of my personal classics, and anything else that I think is worth checking out. Some of the reviews I share will be brand new, and some will be from my personal archives.
Today’s review is of an album that took me to places none other has before:
Pyramids - A Northern Meadow (Profound Lore, 2015)
Genre: Metal
Style: Black Metal, Shoegaze, Ambient, Industrial
I first listened to Pyramids and this album during a period overlapping the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016 in which I was listening to a new album every day and posting reviews of various length and style to Facebook. This heavy inundation often meant that things that didn’t grab me immediately or strike me with some sort of quality I’d never experienced before would fail to make it into my regular rotation. Additionally, I was going through a lot of black metal type music and perhaps getting a little burnt out on it. This album did actually make a strong impression on me, but for whatever reason, I took my time with revisiting it. More hectic and raw albums were consuming my attention, such as Mastery’s VALIS and Dendritic Arbor’s Romantic Love. The lineup of musicians on A Northern Meadow, however, would ensure that I would return to this album, and thank goodness for that.
A project of prolific Texas based vocalist R. Loren, Pyramids listed Colin Marston - a paragon of the modern metal world, who plays in bands such as Krallice, Gorguts, Dysrhythmia, and Behold… The Arctopus, while also producing all these bands and many other notable albums in the avant-garde and metal world - and Vindsval - the mastermind behind Blut Aus Nord, known best for his 777 trilogy of solo albums and idiosyncratic drum production - as primary collaborators and guests on the album. With all three of these musicians being highly regarded in their own right, I came in to listening to the album with a sort of “super-group weariness,” that made it difficult to consider the actual content of the music. Coupled with this weariness is always a sense of expectation; these two forces in tandem can often leave one in disbelief or unable to see the truth when, in fact, a super-group does live up to - and even surpass - ones expectations. This is one such album.
I rediscovered A Northern Meadow in the early months of 2017, and being in a somewhat solitary state and mood, I was struck by how this had passed in one ear and out the other so long. Being the project of musicians all generally involved in black metal, this appears in form to resemble the genre’s rhythms and existential, despair centered themes; in practice, it’s something much more unique. Although the rhythms are present in the guitars and the double bass, there isn’t a blast beat to be found here. Rather, the drums are in Vindsval’s signature industrial style, sounding identifiably synthetic - not to say they’re cheap, like programmed drums can often end up in metal, but rather alien, cold, and distinct. The precision of composed drums allows for a trance inducing consistency, broken up by unpredictable snare syncopations and fills that could only realistically be achieved by this method.
Walking across the wide expanses of the brutalist SUNY Purchase campus in the cold of a winter that stretched deep into March, refusing to yield its grasp on both the air and on my moods, I felt kindred to the icy, breath-like textures presented in the layers of synths and atmospheres that underly this album. Though they no more than provide a subtle bed for the guitars and vocals, they end up defining the sense of absolute solitude and desolation that is the emotional sum of this album. The guitars sit up front on this album, and as is typical in black metal, they often move against each other in intricate counterpoint. Atypically however, their steady stream of tremolo picked notes feels contained and round, sitting somewhat centered in the expanses of reverb and the metallic rasps of granular synthesis and canned, buried sounding harsh vocals that evoke something much more alien than occult. The guitars often warp into dense masses and melting dives, and all these textures evoke the washes of distortion and reverb that characterize the similarly prone-to-languish genre of shoegaze, a clear point of reference in this music.
Presiding ultimately over all these elements are the soaring and ephemeral clean vocals - another distinct contrast to what’s typically found in black metal. The lyrics are difficult to discern for the most part, but by the sheer depth of emotion simply present in the inflection and melody, this is rendered largely irrelevant. The bits that do slip through however can be evocative to the subjective imagination and provoke a deep feeling of detached melancholy. The aforementioned melody of the vocals is one of the most surprisingly satisfying parts of this album. With the guitars not carrying the burden of melody, they are free to explore nuanced harmonic expression and movement, recalling the colors of Krallice at times and the post-tonality and ringing arpeggiated lines of Blut Aus Nord.
What this album gets right in a way that I haven’t ever heard done before is the brooding desolation of black metal crossed expertly with the almost sensual crooning of a vocalist such as - oddly enough - Chino Moreno of Deftones. It’s not immediately apparent due to the slow pace at which the album unfolds and the unrelenting nature of its textures, but this album consists of eight expertly crafted songs, with all the memorability in melody that comes with that. It’s difficult if not impossible to disentangle this music from my own perception and almost spiritual experience of it, but perhaps that’s what I can say most about this album. The best way to experience it is to let it sink in and envelop you, and one day you’ll find yourself struck with awe at the rich expanses of texture and the depth of emotion they provoke.
To buy/stream A Northern Meadow, head over to Profound Lore's Bandcamp page.
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