I admit I jumped on this when it showed up: Billed as a one-time only project, this is Perturbator collaborating with Cult Of Luna’s Johannes Persson which to me just sounded potentially brilliant.
So, not sure what it would be particularly given Perturbator’s progressions of recent years, I cranked it up and…. Hmm. OK the first couple of playthroughs left me disappointed and unimpressed. The music was in its DNA dark ambient/synthwave with the added presence of heavier riffing and harsh vocals grating over the top in a most unvaried fashion. I think it was those vocals that were the initial stumbling block; it seemed to drag the album into a monolithic block as though it simply was a heavier Perturbator with them slapped on top too heavily and stripping away any variation.
But the music itself seemed to be potentially compelling so I persevered and, yes, eventually I got past the vocals and then, even better, began to feel how they fitted into this dark, bleak landscape.
So, back to the beginning. ‘Nothing Will Bear Your Name’ opens with a pitch-black Blade Runner feel, a winding sound as though it’s time to seek shelter even as the world is stilled. A slow, eerie cityscape sounding passage until the sudden vocals blow it apart and we’re moving, slow and relentless as the music becomes denser, heavier and pounding. It’s like watching war break out over a city at night. It flows onwards, ‘In The Void’, a hollowed out dark place where the gravitational pull of violence roils and writhes but the huge crush of the electronics holds it in place and a disturbing but epic melody glistens. It’s fantastic, enveloping music.
The disturbingly titled ‘It Came With The Water’ crawls and scrapes the scene with an insistent guitar amidst the keyboards before the title track moves us onwards. Not exactly a lighter tone, simply its pulsing rhythms find life if again of a darker kind. Horror ebm working in the void and the ruins.
‘The Fall Of A Giant’ has a strange feel of something approaching and a doomy, sludge riff rises put of the electronic sea before it is absorbed by the deluge of heavy keyboards and melody and in some respects this is the perfect palate, the hybrid of the epic soundscapes of Perturbator working in perfect concert with the crushing monolithic sound of Cult Of Luna.
‘Ruin To Decay’ is the epitaph. Seemingly melancholic quiet is simply ground and pushed aside by a fantastic grafting of juddering keyboards and black hole intensity. It’s completely mesmeric. Watching the world fall in time lapse. There is such grandeur to this darkness and slow-motion apocalypse that I simply stare it in the face until it moves beyond me.
Perfect proof that some albums need perseverance, but that the moment when it all makes sense and opens out before you. Two exemplary artists creating a seamless alchemical marriage and creating a beast that is both and neither.
Fantastic. I love being wrong.
(9/10 Gizmo)
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