By: Daniela Patrizi
Near Grey | facebook | twitter | bandcamp | soundcloud |
Released on February 12, 2015 via Bandcamp
Yage is a three tracks album that will surely please those who can deal with an uninterrupted mixture of sludge, post-metal riffs and elements of drone. Yage is also the new album by the Montreal-based post-metal band Near Grey that has already imposed its name in the instrumental music scene with its superb self-titled EP and the first full length album The Herschel Central Peak.
Each track on Yage is twenty minutes of meticulous experimentation and commitment to the physicality of sound. The outcome is a beautifully deep and intense soundtrack to your moments with yourselves and to the reflection of life’s bleakest sides. From the very first listen you’ll be completely involved in the wall of sound that Marc-Olivier, Michel, Kevin and Nicholas have again been able to create, demonstrating that they are on a continuous and superb crescendo from their debut.
The opening ‘Darien Gap’ is catchy as hell. The song atmosphere is absolutely dark, but you’ll always find melodies and progressions here and there that make this track really interesting and it’s a great way to start the album for the way it creates the right tension and sense of anxiety that will dissolve immediately into ‘Katun Cycle’.
The first part of the closing ‘Katun Cycle’ is a celebration of a droning sounds that kicks in from the beginning and comes back again and again like dark waves of a calm ocean of sound. In the wrong state of mind, this song could be a tediously monotonous listen that refuses to take off. In the right state of mind instead, ‘Katun Cycle’ does about everything right. I found it intense and captivating and it even improves in its last part whose sound can easily be the soundtrack of the darkest and most apocalyptic day you can experience. The end blows you away and for me it’s a roaring success.
Yage ends with ‘Desquamation’, which is my favourite track on the album. This song shines for the way it mixes elements of sludge, doom and post-metal, but the overall atmosphere here is incredibly good in holding together beautiful metal riffs with memorable melodies and musical themes. Listening to ‘Desquamation’ is a joy: it frees your mind and let you travel to places you have never been to nor imagined to be. I particularly like it at about the 8th minute… have a close listen and you’ll be rewarded. The last part of the song is completely different and darkness is the foremost quality that comes to mind when describing it.
The music of Yage is heavy and is slow. In several moments of the album the dominant sound is the repetition of just one dark chord that is deep and speaks directly to your heart. Sometimes it’s so deep that it can hurt you. Sometimes it’s also depressive and apocalyptic. Nothing bad: this music is absolutely beautiful.
Yage is a beautiful album that needs to be listened again and again to get all its nuances and details.
