Locrian – New Catastrophism
Locrian – New Catastrophism
Profound Lore
Release Date: 12/08/22
Running Time: 35:18
Review by Dark Juan
10/10
Greetings, my dear friends. It is I, Dark Juan and I am seated before the Doom Pooter and writing this epistle to you before midday. This is a rare and precious thing so treasure it, because normally Dark Juan doesn’t rise before this time, but for some unaccountable reason was compelled to rise from his slumber and stagger downstairs, giant Sports Direct mug full of tea in hand, to tell you about some music he is listening to. Kinda like the hundreds of other times I have done this, with varying degrees of sobriety, throughout the past five years or so of my attempting to leverage a limited talent for writing into a paid career in music journalism, and my abject failure in that worthy goal. Perhaps I should stop haranguing Metal Hammer for only ever talking about Metallica, Avenged Sevenfold and AC/DC, and Kerrang! for their never-ending love of pop-punk and fucking Paramore. I can picture collective circle jerks in the editorial office there every time Hayley Williams releases a new photoset…
What the fuck is wrong with my imagination? I can clearly see all the senior editors doing the biscuit game, hunched around a laptop showing Hayley in varying states of deshabille, shoulders jerking spasmodically while the poor intern tries their level best to interest the senior staff in a cup of tea or coffee or anything to stop the pig-like grunting and sweaty, pistoning pumping…
There’s a reason for restraining orders and why I am kept under lock and key, I suppose. As well as why I am not a real music journo. [And you should have seen it before proof-reading – ED]
The current soundtrack for the endless, blood-soaked, sexually depraved horror film that is Dark Juan’s normal internal state is the first release in seven years from exploratory and experimental Chicago trio Locrian. To listen to Locrian is not to just have music in your ears, it is a sublime and immersive experience, as this band does not play music in the classic sense of the word. Oh no. Locrian are slow, geologically slow, the kind of slow that takes epochs to enact change and this is exactly what Dark Juan needed to hear right now.
Locrian effortlessly straddles the line between Experimental music and Metal. The soundscapes are extraordinarily dense and solid and they can be skeleton-powderingly heavy without ever approaching the kind of structure that a Metal song does, what with all their tiresome verses and choruses and lyrics and whatnot. Locrian don’t write songs, they write experiences…
You know you’re on to something good when the first three songs of an album take up thirty minutes of the runtime. “New Catastrophism” opens with the immersive and colossal ‘Mortichnia’, being an hypnotic ten-minute epic rendition of the sounds that continental shelves make when they grind against each other. One can, when one’s eyes are closed, picture rock splitting and shearing as immense, planet-sized forces grind it against another continent, fracturing it open and allowing the white-hot magma within to bleed out into the world, layer upon layer building as it rapidly cools in the ocean until a new island forms. Then this new island is torn apart again, formed and reformed into twisted new shapes as continental landmasses smash into each other again and again and grind endlessly at each other’s edge before the focus of the music pans out, and you are one of the crew of a survey vessel in orbit, watching this violent planetary assault upon its own meat play out in excruciatingly slow real time. Shockingly dystopian, yet also curiously creative as something new is birthed from the ashes of the old.
‘The Glare Is Everywhere And Nowhere Our Shadow’ also has a sense of scale that is planetary in nature – but (to my fevered imagination anyway) conjures up a claustrophobic feeling as if you are desperately trying to escape the clutches of some kind of maniac having been drugged so your reaction time and sense of space and touch are curiously detached, yet you can still hear and feel but with a three second delay. Your hands in front of your face are fuzzy at the edges, lacking definition and clarity and appear to be detached from the ends of your arms as you stagger down liminal concrete stairways lit by buzzing, flickering neon lights with the sound of your blood pounding ever louder in your ears as you struggle to effectively place one foot in front of the other and MOVE… yet you inevitably start to succumb to the numbness and the narcotic and collapse helpless and panicking and afraid for your life on a landing as you hear the footsteps and the breathing coming ever closer until you black out…
And this sort of black thinking is what Locrian want to invoke. ‘Incomplete Map Of Voids’ builds from a plodding, ponderous drone ever so slowly into a megalithic explosion of sound, underpinned by a simple guitar motif that carries the whole composition throughout – in fact, in order to explain it, imagine Boards of Canada crossed with Deftones and Swans. Dissonance, Ambient sound, Metal, Drone, Post-Rock and Shoegaze all collide in a kaleidoscopic whirl of colour and stereoscopic imagery, still and quiet when you first look but then you discern the black moving through the colour, the black ever increasing and moving more quickly as time passes until only obsidian is left.
In short, Locrian are the curiously emotional soundtrack to universal dystopia. It is the sound of urban and environmental decay on planetary scales, a sonic equivalent to the three-body problem and the musical accompaniment to the endless cycle of birth / death / rebirth that powers universes, from the smallest organisms to the vast nurseries of stars.
Gets you thinking, doesn’t it? To an individual part of your microbiome, a single microscopic organism, you are a self-contained universe beyond any sense of scale. To us, the whole sky is a universe. To the stars, interstellar space is a universe. To light, everything there has ever been and ever will be is the universe.
Goddammit, Locrian, I am in no fit state to ponder these existential questions!
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System is now also thinking of Hayley Williams in an attempt to get his head back out of the clouds and awards Locrian 10/10 for an album that is huge in sound and execution, but might only find a limited audience because it is not metal in the traditional sense, but it is as Metal as Metal could possibly be in the scale and disaster their music evokes. Nevertheless, I absolutely fucking love this record and this band.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Mortichnia
02. The Glare Is Everywhere And Nowhere Our Shadow
03. Incomplete Map Of Voids
04. Cenotaph To The Final Glacier
LINEUP:
Terence Hannum – Synthesizers, vocals, tape loops
André Foisy – Guitars, electronics
Steven Hess – Drums, electronics
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
