(In late June Reigning Phoenix Music released a new album by the Spanish band White Stones, and today we provide our writer DGR‘s interesting review of this new work.)
Much like an immortal Heinz condiment-themed musical group, we’re forever playing catch-up.
I could never claim nor want to pontificate about the inner workings of a group or their band dynamic. These sorts of things are private for a reason and more often than not maintained that way so that a group doesn’t just become the ‘such-and-such show’ with three other musicians hanging around. You could make some solid as a rock ballpark guesses with certain groups as to who is responsible for what, but the pontification is more intellectual exercise for fun than anything that could actually have an effect.
What I will say, though, is that every time I’ve listened to White Stones, it has been both reminder and revelation of just how important bassist Martín Méndez has been to Opeth‘s sound over the years. The projects are purposefully and determinedly different from one another – White Stones having been obtuse and strange since their launch with Kuarahy back in 2020 – but it’s hard not to recognize that dude’s bass playing and transpose it over the works he’s been involved in, only to realize how fiercely creative that other group’s rhythm section has always been, with White Stones bringing it to the forefront.
Photo by Sandra Artigas
Surprisingly, White Stones have never made much hay about this fact either. It is well known and mentioned that Martín has been Opeth‘s bassist for a long time and White Stones is the project in which he has been free to exercise creatively as much as he wants, but other than that, they’ve never really shouted it from the rooftops or trumpeted this fact across the world. It is just known and accepted that this is the death metal creative outlet and it has resulted in a fascinating pair of releases over the previous years.
However, White Stones have also been a surprisingly progressive-minded group for their career, gathering together a cadre of death metal musicians across Spain that has pulled influence from ethnic folklore, folk music, death metal, and warped guitar riffing that is recognizably music but sharply bent just enough that it feels strangely alien. There’s a grooving aspect to White Stones‘ music, and yes, credit to having a bassist way up at the forefront of the mix every time, and an exploratory aspect that has resulted in many a part being played as if it were a finger-walking exercise.
In fact, it is rare for White Stones to have something resembling a straightforward single. White Stones aren’t currently in the playground of the brutally stupid and their music has consistently seemed high-minded: written to be challenging on purpose. You’re going to find all the interesting quirks and head-turners in their music, each album acting as if it were its own forty-minute quest into something familiar but not fully understood yet. An uncanny valley of the interesting.
Whether it be the proto and primordial “let’s prove this works” of Kuarahy or the overwhelming darkness of its follower Dancing Into Oblivion, there was an intriguing intensity to the first pair of White Stones releases, which also makes their younger sibling in the group’s newest album Memoria Viva all the more interesting. With a three-year gap between releases, Memoria Viva is a different beast entirely, one that has the hallmarks of its older siblings but one that is also more interested in the flow and dynamics of its overall experience than tying it down into one particular song.
Three years sits on the starter ledge of “decent sized gap between albums” and is sometimes the result of band lineups shifting, yet in this case White Stones remains fairly unscathed; the crew that made up the Dancing Into Oblivion lineup remains for Memoria Viva. As the group have had more time to gel together, it becomes clear how Memoria Viva became a more organic-sounding album, because it’s rare you get a release like this without it being the result of a mostly united vision.
Songs throughout Memoria Viva are broken up with interstitial bits, including multiple instrumental interludes and introductions – sometimes adding quite a bit of run-time to particular songs – and elsewhere in the album the music remains as exploratory as White Stones could make it. Songs have a habit of swaying and swirling around, as if locked in an eternal dance of their own, and so even though you may not have as much of vocalist Eloi Boucherie‘s raspy growl, there is more room for the band themselves to flex their muscles. Which might explain the sudden appearance of a surprisingly Opeth-ian sounding song in “Zamba de Orun,” right down to the flute get-down that happens in the center of the song.
Yet we would be remiss in our duties to spend the whole time pointing out how Memoria Viva twists and turns with agile grace and then zeroing in on how the album deviates from the usual White Stones blueprint. The early pairing of “Humanoides” and “D-Generación” features plenty of head-spinning changes within and rolling guitar and bass. Generally, Memoria Viva moves with an instrumental/scene-setting introduction and then two to three songs and another background-builder will follow. Eventually, those painterly instrumental tracks just get folded into the regular introductions, which is why the last few songs tend to be a little beefier on the run-time.
A journey like the pair of “Grito Al Silencio” and “Vencedores Vencidos” is well worth the effort though, with those two also containing one of the few times where there is something of an ear-hooking melody on Memoria Viva. White Stones haven’t been much of your traditional “hummable melody” style of group; instead, the deftness with which they play is what makes them stick out. You’re meant to appreciate this sort of thing, not nod your head along to it like some sort of simpleton.
You’re likely going to be taking Memoria Viva in as one journey more often than not. The actual amount of “full band” songs within Memoria Viva is probably closer to a six-song extended EP, yet the way songs are constantly floating and spilling into one another means that it would almost be lesser without the band flexing their muscles on the multitude of instrumentals in between. Memoria Viva has peaks and valleys in the way a truly planned work does; the sequencing isn’t at random and this is an album where there isn’t really any clear standout “single”.
These are intricately written songs and proof of how malleable the “progressive death metal” tag can be made. It’s not as overwhelmingly dark as its immediate predecessor and shares more with its first-album sibling Kaurahy; Memoria Viva takes many of those ideas and expands them into full form. It continues White Stones‘ trend of their albums being fascinating from a listening standpoint, and while it may not have the sort of urgent and immediate appeal that we rely on in heavy metal, there’s so much to appreciate and dissect here that it is well worth a listen.
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