What kind of music is hiding beneath this cover? While I am a fan of photography, and while the picture is colourful and quite pleasing to look at, I have to say that the image of a metal carafe, filled with plastic-wrapped flowers, standing in a river, triggered initially no associations at all. The composition looked simultaneously accidental and staged. What was the connection to music here? I had no idea. I did have a hunch, though, regarding the genre of the music. Just like death metal bands like their covers gory, post metal bands like them artistic. I thought that this could be some artistic post-metal and that turned out to be right.
Constellatia are a trio from Cape Town, South Africa, and Magisterial Romance, their second full-length album, is my first encounter with them. Their debut album The Language of Limbs was released 3 years ago and received generally favourable reviews. The band play a curious amalgam of different styles of music that really is not that easy to describe and even more difficult to interpret. In that amalgam, the components appear to be a means to an end and less important than the character of the end product. So, while you can recognize elements of black metal, progressive metal and shoegaze in the music, the fact that the harmonies in their compositions are short-lived, seemingly incidental, ever evolving and changing is far more significant than the music genres involved in creating them.
The album’s four tracks, which all have a running time of around ten minutes, do not have any kind of traditional song structure. So far, so post metal, one could say. But the compositions also lack a red thread, a story, something that would connect them and help you to make sense of what you are hearing. The only constants here are change and chance. Legitimate choices, certainly, as governing principles for an album, since these are also key elements of our everyday lives. But the stories we humans tell each other of our experiences usually have more structure, more form. The lack of a fathomable string or story arch represents somewhat of a challenge for listeners.
What can you expect? A post black metal soundscape with random tempo changes, blast beats, soaring guitar parts that appear out of nowhere, spherical keyboard tunes and harsh, guttural male vocals. Track number three, Adorn, also includes dreamy female vocals which create even more contrast. The atmosphere of the soundscapes changes fluidly and ceaselessly, from contentedness to melancholia, from despair to madness, to dreaming and musing and back again. It seems that the aim was to capture and depict a wide range of emotions and experiences as well as their ephemerality.
If what I have said so far about the album hasn’t scared you off, you might as well give it a listen. If you are a post metal fan, I’m sure you will find something to your liking here. If you listen with an open mind and follow the artists down the path they want to show you, you will at least see part of the picture they are trying to paint. However, it has to be said that this release also has an air of artiness and elitism about it which might not be everybody’s cup of tea.
(7/10 Slavica)
Leave a Reply