3 out of 5

Label: House of Mythology

Produced by: Lorenzo Stecconi (recorded by)

Every review of this thing is glowing, and I kept going back over it again, and again, familiarizing myself – in an admittedly very limited fashion – with its inspiring source materials, and giving the twenty minute tracks time beyond that to work their magic.

Do you like Red Sparowes? I think they’re okay. I get along with them, but I guess I would say I don’t get much out of them, either. Godspeed! You Black Emperor? Same. Jhator feels like like company to those acts.

I don’t think my ambivalence owes to the tempered, relatively sedate entries here being in surface level contrast with Zu’s previous albums of jazz-metal skronk, as that’s really just the most prominent stuff: Zu has always been shifting their sound from the start, and this album isn’t surprising in that regard, or out of line with how they’ve been progressing from release to release, or with other things in my collection, beyond the aforementioned bands.

Going back to which: Sparowes, Godspeed!, and now Zu, with this disc, tend to prioritize mood over the contents. And given that I dabble with, collectively, a fair amount of noise, drone, and experimental music, I’m fine with that, but the Jhator version lands in a kind of void between being too specific, and too general: having a narrative (texts / histories which were the seeds for the songs – a Tibetan funeral practice for A Sky Burial; various ancient Egyptian texts for The Dawning Moon Of The Mind), but then also wanting to craft something very spacious, that emotes a big, wide feeling. For me, it ends up being not enough, those twenty minutes a not-uninteresting but also not immersive crawl to relative peaks that could’ve arguably been more effective in half the runtime. But more positively, obviously if the groups I’m naming make your hit list, I imagine this will appeal, and I also hope I’m clear in that it’s not without merits for me as well: Burial’s buzzing drone that winds to a heartbeat bass groove is quite moving as it transitions; and the reverse structure of Dawning Moon that takes percussion clatter and electronic quibbles and streamlines it along the way is cool, and conceptually satisfying.

This listener just doesn’t necessarily connect with that approach. But I’m still listening to Zu – this album included, as it’s a logical part of their journey.