(written by Islander)
Today, on the eve of its September 24 release, we premiere a full stream of Stargazer, the debut album by Crypt of Reason from Homiel, Belarus.
The road toward completion of the album was not an easy one. Five years after forming in 2008, the band released their debut EP Creation of Despair. But after completing the writing of their first full-length, the band’s main songwriter Pavel Minutin unexpectedly passed away in 2016.
Crypt of Reason ultimately decided to finish their work on the record that became Stargazer, and they have dedicated it to Pavel‘s memory. They introduce it with a line from Solaris, the fantastic science fiction novel written by the great Stanislaw Lem:
“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”
In Solaris, it was a sentient, planet-spanning ocean that opened some of those doors among the humans inhabiting a research station above the oceanic entity. It’s fitting that Crypt of Reason refer to that novel, because the music on Stargazer is also vast, mysterious, and unsettling, deeply unearthly and yet poignantly human, and often so astonishingly heavy and violent that you can imagine planets being broken into pieces, with naught but an expanding asteroid field left behind.
Even the first song standing alone begins to create those impressions. The reverberations of the notes that open “Dissolving in Fractal Chaos” are alien and haunting, and they sound more frightening when the band suddenly magnify the song’s power with stupendous chords, spine-shattering drums, and monstrous roars.
The music grievously wails in the high end while continuing to deliver pulverizing force deep below. The band also tighten the tension, as the drums erupt in obliterating bursts and the vocals explode in screams, and they deepen the music’s alien mystery through notes that ring again like crystalline chimes, dramatically contrasting with the titanic lo-frequency upheavals and detonations.
But behind the doors they open, agonies are revealed, which become excruciating. And so the music in just this one song already displays different dimensions — cold and alien, but also recognizably human in its grief, confusion, and despair. “Crushing” also seems too tame a word for the song’s bludgeoning force, which might make you worry that the foundations of your home are about to come apart.
As the album expands through the next 8 songs, which significantly vary in length (but never overstay their welcome), they increasingly build an experience that’s dreamlike, though these strange dreams aren’t peaceful and placid, and increasingly experimental as well.
The band repeatedly create intersections between wonder and pain, between chilling spells and jaw-dropping cataclysms, interspersed with interludes and overtures of haunting beauty and poignant sorrow (you’ll encounter one of those in the second song, “Illusions of Meanings“, and it makes the cataclysm that comes right after even more head-exploding).
The vocals continue to drop low and spear high as they strikingly render moods of terrible wretchedness and ferocious rage, and the band also continue shifting tempos and dialing the magnitude of power up and down.
The music’s feeling of alien-ness never completely disappears; even in the softest passages, the notes glitter and shimmer, sometimes girded by massive, throbbing beats, as in “Savior“, which comes across as a futuristic piece of electronica.
There, and in songs that follow it, Crypt of Reason grow more adventurous, bringing in other stylistic ingredients to flavor their morphing manifestations of atmospheric death/doom and post-metal, including engaging elements of prog-rock (the proggy interplay between the band’s huge bass and the glittering ring of guitars and keys is especially noticeable in “The Origin Curse” and “Hollow Cycles“).
At times you might even think of Pink Floyd, if that band had been orders of magnitude heavier, but in songs like “Erebus” and “The Bliss of Quiet“, which brings the album to a devastating close, you might also imagine being pulled into hellish nightmares. Even the mesmerizing “Hollow Cycles” becomes nightmarish and head-spinning; filled with contrasting textures and musical styles, it’s one of the best single-song displays on the album of everything Crypt of Reason are capable of.
Stargazer really is a stunning album. Meticulously crafted and beautifully produced to deliver both power and clarity, it will keep you perched on the edge of your seat from start to finish, and now we happily leave you to it:
CRYPT OF REASON are:
Alexander Naumenko (vocals)
Vladimir Izotov (drums, backing vocals)
Konstantin Nikiforov (bass)
Also on this album:
Zergved (additional vocals)
Alex Sedin (guitars, synths)
Stargazer was produced by Alex Sedin (White Ward, Anachronism, Blighted Eye) and the band. It was also mixed and mastered by Alex Sedin. It’s available for order now on Bandcamp.
PRE-ORDER:
https://cryptofreason.bandcamp.com/album/stargazer
CRYPT OF REASON ONLINE:
https://www.instagram.com/cryptofreason/
https://www.facebook.com/CryptOfReason/