3 out of 5

Label: SFI Records

Produced by: James Plotkin (mastered by)

I’d preview my review of this album by reminding people that I’m a jerk with poor taste. Okay? We’re aligned?

Great. So – I don’t like Isis all that much. Or Old Man Gloom. Or SUMAC. Or a lot of the output on SIGE Records. Read between the lines there, and it seems that maybe I’m not keen on Aaron Turner-led projects, and I’ll sorely cop to that. …Sorely, because of how influential Turner has been upon my music catalogue: he’s been involved with a lot of music I love in various fashion, probably most heavily via Hydra Head Records, which was my main springboard into a lot of awesome stuff. (The label’s consistent art design – often from Turner – was what initially caught my eye; another creative medium in which he’s added to / affected my taste palette.) But nonetheless, when I finally got around to checking out the bands where he was out front, I often felt like the music was either overly calculated as “heavy,” or trying too hard to be arty about metal, or even just doing artiness for the sake of it. Abstractly, I appreciate the skill, and less abstractly, this is a person with a constant need to output music, and I respect that. Heck, he didn’t let the changing landscape of music collapsing one label – Hydra Head – prevent him from pretty immediately standing up another.

Joachim Nordwall I am admittedly not familiar with before this release, teaming him with Turner for ‘Malign Seeds,’ but to my ears, there’s a pretty clear line between how each artist contributed to this: Turner did the guitar and vocal bits; Nordwall did the synths and beats. That’s oversimplifying what was apparently a process of figuring out how to balance this act, but: is it? That caveat is kind of exactly what I’m talking about with Isis and so on: Turner’s work feels calculated to be difficult, which is offputting to me; that calculation becomes… predictable.

Nordwall and Turner combine well, or at least I dig the way they settled on working together, with the former laying down a sparse beat, some fuzzy, slow synths, and Turner slowcore guitarring atop, adding in atmospherics and occasional freakouts. And vocals, and more on that in a moment. There are stretches across Seeds that lean into either white noise drone, or, on what is to me the album’s best track, Barrow, a Codeine-esque hardcore style that’s just perfection. I drool for this track. Because it does away with the artifice: Turner is growling, but he’s not adding an extra layer of “metal” to that growl to make it sound unnecessarily gloomy; the track is willing to provide a beat and a structure, which I absolutely don’t require, but here allows the drawling pace to have trancelike power. The more milquetoast edition of this is The Bath, where Nordwall’s distorted, bare heartbeat gives a platform for random guitar squalls from Turner. It’s fascinating for a bit, but loses impact after a few minutes, while also being a bit too sporadic for drone.

Regulator is where the equation slaps itself, because the musical interplay is of Barrow’s quality and intensity, but Turner has to come in with yelly hardcore poetry, and it feels a bit cringe. It was already heavy; I’m not sure what the vocals added except distraction.

Which is ultimately my summary: there are excellent ideas all throughout this album, but then there are other ideas piled atop, and I’m often not sure to what end. There’s some media copy talking about making music for another world, and sure, but that tickles that ‘art for art’s sake’ vibe again for me. Fans of what Turner has done on the more experimental edges of his career will, I think, be at home here – it’s blending that to a somewhat structured minimalist electronic backbone.