(Andy Synn bows down before the new album from Light Dweller, out this Friday on Avantgarde Music)
It’s pretty well documented by now that, generally, I prefer “bands” over solo projects.
There’s just something about the magic that happens when you get a group of musicians together and they start to bounce ideas off of each other, introducing an element of randomness and quantum chaos as they feed on each other’s energy, which seems to produce (in my opinion anyway) more interesting results.
But the work of Cameron Boesch, aka Light Dweller, has always been an exception to this particular “rule”, as he’s developed such a distinctive creative voice over the years weaving together bits and pieces of Immolation and Ulcerate, Krallice and Gorguts, and beyond, that there’s never any fear of his work falling afoul of stock tropes and standard clichés.
2022’s Lucid Offering in particular stood out as easily his magnum opus, striking a brilliant balance between atmosphere and dissonance, introspection and aggression, that was always going to be hard enough to replicate, let alone surpass.
Which I suppose begs the question… what do you do when you’ve reached the top of your particular, personal mountain? Where the heck do you go from there?
The answer, it turns out, is that when there’s no more mountain left to climb that’s when you start to dig a little deeper.
After all, just because you’ve reached the peak doesn’t mean there isn’t more musical territory for you to unearth and explore while you’re up there – and once you’ve planted your flag and staked your claim with as much authority as Light Dweller have you’re free to mine that territory to your heart’s content.
In this case The Subjugate finds Boesch starting to toy with the more abrasive electronic side of the band’s sound – listen out for the glitchy, percussive pulse which underpins the second half of anxiety-inducing opener “Echoes from the Spectral Void”, for example, or the gristly throb and churn of the disturbingly dissonant title-track – in a manner which recalls the biomechanical bombast of Autarkh (and, by extension, their more blackened precursors in Dodecahedron) and Anaal Nathrakh‘s more aggrotech-influenced material.
It’s a smart decision, when you think about it – while I’ve always found Boesch’s drum programming to be a cut above most, written and composed with a slightly more naturalistic flair than many of his competitors, others have criticised the lack of a live drummer on the recordings… so why not lean into it and make it a feature, rather than a bug? – and opens up a host of potential new options and directions for the project precisely because it’s not tied to the strictures and structures of a “normal” line-up.
If anything, my one complaint (or constructive criticism, since there’s very little to actually complain about here) is that Light Dweller don’t go quite far enough – both the monstrously riffy, technically tormented “Cessation of Time” (which you can listen to below) and the almost unrelentingly intense “Phasing Through the Veil”, for example, save their more experimental, electro-ambient embellishments until right at the end, rather than weaving them into the warp and weft of the track – meaning that as good as The Subjugate is (and it is) it sometimes seems to tease a little more than it actually delivers.
A bit of subtlety isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course – the moody atmospheric undercurrents and flickering flashes of esoteric electronica during brooding early stand-out “Fracturing Light” and late-album highlight “Adrift the Expanding Nothingness” (which takes full advantage of its slightly extended run-time to fully immerse the listener in layers of grinding distortion and groaning dissonance, mangled anti-hooks and strangled pseudo-melody) in particular play a slightly more restrained, but no less striking, role in the album’s ongoing evolution – it’s more that there are moments here that are crying out for Light Dweller to take a leap into the unknown, rather than simply feeling their way forwards.
That being said, this is still a very good album – in the aftermath of Lucid Offering it would almost have to be – and there’s no question that Boesch has earned a little bit of leeway with his previous releases, so while he may not be quite ready to take that leap there’s no doubt that he’s still on top of the heap.