Downfall of Gaia’s towering tremolo-soaked excursions should be enough to drown even the hardest of hearts in the band’s emotional vortex. The mix of post-black metal and cascading, sludgy breakdowns provide an excursion that feels both familiar and intriguingly unique at the some time. A bit of Deafheaven and Wolves in the Throne Room, Cult of Luna and Harakiri For The Sky while driving hard on the crust beats to break up the torrent of blasts is pretty hard for a junkie of all those bands to resist. The band mould-breaking 2012 effort ‘Cranes was a clear sign that DofG were not content to sit within the pack and the hour-long shoegaze eargasm of Aeon Unveils the Thrones of two years later was a blast of seismic proportions to the point where I kind of knew even then that both those releases would be tricky to live up to.
The answer is, I’d suggest, that they haven’t even tried. Editing down 2016’s Atrophy and now this to pretty much exactly one third of the time – about 40 minutes each – seems at first like an odd thing to do for compositions where repetitive melody is welcomed with open arms and which scream out for endless play. It’s almost a little cruel to release something so, well, finite. But while I have some complaints – mainly that the ambition to scale the mighty and ambitious heights of Aeon seems to have been all but shrugged off – Downfall of Gaia continue to put nary a foot wrong.
Ethic of Radical Finitude is impeccable. More straightforward than Cranes and Aeon and more at ease with itself than the energy-infused Atrophy which stalked along just like the wolf on its cover but with a tumbling sense of excitement and unpredictability. Finitude initially launches into more classic shoegaze territory as if the band is desperate to show how masterfully this stuff can be done in the right hands. But, while this makes for some submersive listening, it feels like the really interesting stuff doesn’t come in until fourth track Guided Through A Starless Night when the familiar DofG d-beats begin to bounce around and the song structure takes a kicking from all sides as a result – in the nicest way.
The driving and soulful As Our Bones Break To The Dance brings yet more sonic precision with it and the final epic Of Withering Violet Leaves puts you in an emotional place somewhere between flying towards the sun and heading for the scaffold. Some nice, clean gothic vocals round off the album but also serve as a nagging reminder that ‘Finitude has not quite reached the same heights of any of its predecessors despite its glorious product and finely honed, skilful delivery. A good stopgap between more releases, I hope, but more ambition wouldn’t go amiss or risk getting squished between your own legacy and the throng of other artists doing similar things in more daring ways.
(7.5/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
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