(written by Islander)
The Norwegian one-man band Felgrave has created a new album that could be superficially represented as the raising of three monuments. Entitled Otherlike Darknesses, it consists of three songs of towering dimensions, two of them at 18 minutes or slightly above and the third at 12 1/2.
That’s a prospect that may be daunting to consider. It boldly tests the attention spans of most listeners, and it’s a test for Felgrave as well. Although the project’s 2020 debut album A Waning Light also included much longer-than-average songs, and did so successfully, these new monuments are even bigger. The test is whether they can succeed in drawing listeners into their environs and creating enough wonders and thrills to keep those listeners from wandering away.
Some of you have already begun grading the test, because the band’s new label Transcending Obscurity Records has already debuted “Pale Flowers Under An Empty Sky,” the song that’s 12 1/2 minutes long. Today we’re premiering one of those even longer two songs, and it’s the title track — “Otherlike Darknesses” — which comes last in the running order.
This isn’t a droning song intended to produce a hypnotic trance, as some EP-length individual songs are. Instead, it’s a shapeshifter, a musical changeling. For a borderline obsessive-compulsive like me, it’s tempting to methodically lay out for you each step in the morphosis, but I’m attempting to resist that. The music isn’t at all tedious (it easily passes the test of wonder and thrills), and so it wouldn’t be fair to give it a tedious introduction. So I’ll try this instead:
Imagine yourself not as a wanderer among daunting monuments but as a visitor to a carnival that didn’t roll into the outskirts of town on trucks, assembled over days, but appeared suddenly out of thin air fully formed, a sure sign that it’s going to be… otherlike.
Among the attractions are crazed acrobats, wild whirling and cavorting tones fire-bright in their appearance, backed by frantically leaping and vigorously tumbling drums and fronted by madhouse screams and torrid roars.
The attractions also include slashing and battering savagery, but you’ll also take detours into a tent of funhouse mirrors, where the music (fashioned by both guitars and organs) warps in strange and unsettling ways, with only a weirdly murmuring bass as your guide. (You might begin to think the drinks along the midway were laced with psychoactive substances.)
Moving along, what was first unsettling in the house of mirrors becomes downright frightening, as if you’ve somehow walked through the mirrors into a different dimension. A voice sings in high warbling and reverberating tones from a distance, and the shrill musical accompaniment (still strange) sounds almost childlike.
But dark things hulk in that new dimension too — and then attack in musical and vocal frenzies of manic velocity, demented intensity, and mind-bending intricacy.
As you run and stumble, you find yourself in a different place, a very odd place. Maybe you fell down Alice’s rabbit hole amidst the twisted mirrors. Now, the bass quirkily bleats, the drums happily amble along, the distant voice sings in a different and maybe woozier way.
Before you can completely wrap your head around these odd new visions, you suddenly find yourself in a madhouse on fire, with elaborately layered instrumentation careening and convulsing in screaming paroxysms, the drums also going violently nuts, and haughty roars of a beast urging you to run again.
Is there any way to get back out to where you came from? Any exit from the thrilling but perilous madness of this otherworldly carnival before you lose your own bewildered mind? The music doesn’t point to any exits… but (sadly) it does end.
In more conventional, and therefore probably dull terms, you could think of this dazzling song as an avant-garde extravaganza of death, black, and prog metal, a remarkably elaborate, technically jaw-dropping, and highly idiosyncratic head-spinner of a high order. “Doom” is in the usual label-splicing for Felgrave, but I don’t get that in this particular song, except maybe in the singing, but only maybe there.
But these three songs differ from each other in the experiences they present, though all are remarkably inventive and relentlessly surprising. And so of course, we also invite you to listen to the first song that T.O. revealed from the album — the moodier, more mysterious, and more melodically haunting, but still mad “Pale Flowers Under an Empty Sky” (pale flowers do grow within the carnival grounds this time) — which leaves just one more to be discovered (“Winds Batter My Keep“):
THE LINE-UP ON OTHERLIKE DARKNESSES:
M. L. Jupe: Vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards, and programming
Robin Stone (Evilyn, Norse): Drums
The album was mixed by M. L. Jupe and it was mastered by Brendan Sloan (of Convulsing). The stupendous artwork was created by Adam Burke.
Transcending Obscurity is releasing the album on CD and digital formats, with lots of apparel featuring Adam Burke‘s stunning cover art.
PRE-ORDER:
https://felgrave-label.bandcamp.com/album/otherlike-darknesses
http://transcendingobscurity.aisamerch.com/
http://eu.tometal.com/
FELGRAVE:
http://facebook.com/felgrave.doom