Customer Reviews

Immolation/Immersion

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Nels Cline, West Coast guitar iconoclast, records his finest achievement. Never one to tread the well-worn paths of guitardom, Cline here ventures into uncharted guitar-bass-drum waters. Striving for and bringing forth a primal aural landscape of heretofore unencountered sounds and sensibilities, Cline stakes out territories and feelings far beyond the precincts of ordinary guitar sounds, reaching for and often evoking a chthonic, primordial musical self-understanding that at once evokes and declaims a rawness of nature that participates in purely controlled chaos.

There's a raw power and elemental intensity present here that taps into nature's most regnant and unconquerable moments, a kind of feral ferocity that steamrolls everything in its way, a presence of such magnitude that all opposing it fades and deliquesces in its presence. Cline and cohorts unleash a sonic force of such enormity that prior efforts along such lines pale by comparison: These dudes have absolutely annexed metal jazz, making it their personal playground, cavorting and gamboling in it with supreme felicity and grace.

Deploying a staggeringly diverse set of sonic strategies, the band pummels listeners with skronks and squeaks, honks and bleeps, shrieks and blats so formidable that the listener is dragged, willy-nilly, into precincts of sonic subversion seldom if ever before encountered in the history of recorded music. This is metal jazz of staggering proportions, a soundscape of thick commotion and roiling anarchy to chill the marrow of all but the most stalwart and intrepid musical explorers.

Listen at your own risk, but be primed for music of uncommon gravity and consequence.

Nels Cline resides comfortably in a strange patch of territory where anarchic noise meets battered prog, all firmly grounded in jazz; not quite where Pak or Hella is at, not quite Ornette Coleman or Hawkwind. "Lake of Fire Memories" starts out of the gate at a blistering scronk. A difficult, abbreviated descent into hell. Much safer chomping on the title track, longer than an album side and teetering somewhere between an Art Blakey jam, a Sun Ra liftoff and a hearing test. Porous and dense, like a bug in a sponge. Bizarre sounds from battleship undersides in "Ghost Bell Canto," alighting stark, beautiful sculptures: wires coming out of wind, weeds sprouting in the husks of scrapped androids, worms draped in foil.