Following on from a split with St Louis-based doom mongers Fister, Chrch signed to Neurosis’s Neurot Recordings and set to work on their sophomore effort – Light Will Consume Us All. A title that seems to recall the 2008 documentary on Norwegian black metal, Until The Light Takes Us. And, for the most part, the music here is less face rending than that infamous genre although there are similarities in terms of vocal performance and an undeniable shared tone of cacophonous despair. The last track ‘Aether’, however, does evoke those mid 90s church burners as it sees out the album in full blown blast beat mode. Starting relatively sedately, the finale is a no less punishing trip through vanquished realms and fading light. Anguished cries recoil against guitars that seem more blade than string and the whole thing comes to an unholy, revelations-defining end.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
If the band’s name merely alludes to connotations of religious rites then the music fully insinuates a world of clandestine ceremonies carried out in reverb-waking halls slung with red drapes and lit by the flicker of candlelight. There are masks too… probably.
Opener ‘Infinite’ builds from an off kilter guitar line that seems to ask vague and unanswerable questions into a heaving riff of amplified destruction. Vocals slide from apprehensive to a cracked demonic growl and each iteration of the rhythm returns louder and full of a substantial, yet well gauged, rage. Gloaming notes chime out after a respite from the storm. An ethereal voice soothes from within a dispersing haze. An underlying sense of threat lingers and it seems undeniable that this peace will burst. Notes wind and bend. Towards and away from one another, slowing right down to a single note ringing out into the path of a noisy wrecking ball that verily tears the church roof off. Each swing of a plectrum or drum stick sends scything doom shards into trembling eardrums. Huge slabs of sludge thump as a wailing sonic cluster cuts through and sends this whole thing soaring into the heavens. Twenty minutes whip by in the gawp of a third eye.
‘Portals’ starts with less formality but even greater magnitude as it is straight in with tectonic plate-unsettling blasts of glacial-paced, low end havoc. Live this can only be presumed to dislodge tooth fillings and cause contact lenses to shear through zonules of Zinn as the wearer’s eyes rewind. The twin vocals of Eva Rose and Chris Lemos provide euphoric transcendence and chanted ritual respectively. Then, as guitars buzz like saws, this all amps up into violent shrieks and growls. Another change of gear sets up a collar-gripping groove that could split the alps. Throw in a majestic hook from Rose and this track provides the consciousness heightening hit that those in Palehorse/Palerider withdrawal have been seeking. As a mid-point crescendo this is unadulterated bliss.
If the album title is indeed a reference to the black metal scene then their name and waste-laying compositions can certainly be perceived as a direct statement to that world: they have risen out of the burnt embers and evolved beyond “u”.
