AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: GLOSON — “CRINGE”

Photo by Jari Välitalo

 

We loved Grimen, the debut album by the Swedish sludge/post-metal titans who call themselves Gloson, released earlier this year by Art of Propaganda. To borrow a few words from Andy Synn’s review at our site, “Grimen is an album with, for want of a better word, real presence. Something which makes it impossible to ignore, and impossible to forget…. There’s just something about this music, something so uniquely dynamic and utterly overpowering, that I find myself irresistibly drawn to it again and again, as if it has its own inescapable gravity…. [A]lthough it’s only February, I think I’ve already found one of my albums of the year.”

Early last fall, five months before the album’s release, Gloson delivered its first single, a stunning song called “Cringe“. And now we have the good fortune to be the bearers of an amazing new live video for that very song.

 

 

When I first heard “Cringe“, I wasted no time writing about it here. “Anchored by a huge, gravel-textured low end that shivers the spine and tumbling drum beats that rumble the guts, the song spins out streamers of ethereal guitar melody and pounds with hammering riffs, building an almost hallucinatory atmosphere even as it gets your head bobbing. It also includes contrasting vocal textures as well as an extended instrumental section in the back half that’s electrifying and spellbinding.”

What Andy wrote about the album as a whole also holds true for this song: “Everything has an almost physical weight and texture to it that you can practically taste and touch”.

And we could hardly hope for a better video treatment of the song than the one that was captured and edited by Gustav Bondeson (whose web site is here) when the band performed “Cringe” at Kajskjulet in Halmstad, Sweden, on February 25th 2017. With a powerful sound from the live audio (mixed and mastered by Christian Larsson), the video puts you right into the middle of a very heavy experience.

The band and Gustav Bondeson made some ingenious decisions about how to capture the performance — including the choice of camera angles, the decision to film it in black and white, and the locating of a light show directed at the stage rather than from the stage. Among other things, you get to see powerful drummer Samuel Karlsson from behind, with bands of light piercing the smoke in front of him like the last rays of a dying sun at the end of the world (and that’s the kind of mental imagery the song itself evokes).

And so, one of the best single songs of 2016 becomes the basis for one of the best live videos of this year.

 

Hope you enjoy the video as much as we have. To hear the rest of Grimen and get it for yourselves, check these links:

Bandcamp: https://gloson.bandcamp.com/
Art of Propaganda: http://www.art-of-propaganda.de/shop/
Amazon: https://goo.gl/WJi0JA
Nuclear Blast: https://goo.gl/AmHPwj
EMP: http://www.emp.de/art_350616/
JPC: https://goo.gl/gKM0UJ
Weltbild (D or CH): https://goo.gl/8nsV2C
Ex Libris (CH): https://goo.gl/Oc2Za3

Gloson on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/Glosonswe