Two years ago, I reviewed Left Fallow the debut album of post metal band Ryr from Berlin, Germany. From my perspective, the perspective of having listened to a lot of post rock and post metal, it sounded generic, too much like the myriad of other post rock and post metal albums out there. It lacked character, there was nothing that would make me recognize the band’s music from among similar output. The album cover, also, was rather bland, and everything had a bit of empty hipsterism about it. In short, I didn’t like it.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw Ryr’s new album, their second full-length, Transient, on our review list. I would have scrolled past it without thinking twice about it, had not the label name caught my eye. The band, it appeared, had changed labels. Their new album was being released by Golden Antenna Records. Golden Antenna is a fine small label from Germany and their releases and I usually get along very well. If Golden Antenna is releasing this, I thought, it can’t be that bad. My curiosity was awakened and I decided to explore a bit further.
On You Tube I found a video to one track from the album, the opening track in fact – Trajectory. Riff by riff and frame after frame, it won me over. I was impressed. Gone was the genericness that I had heard in the band’s sound. The music was bleak, crushing and unusually heavy for post metal. It had character to spare. Together the video and the music successfully captured the bleak atmosphere of big city life. After viewing the video, I asked the editor of Ave Noctum to send me the album for review and am very glad I did so. There is nothing better than a learning curve that does away with your own prejudices.
Having listened to the whole album many times by now, the first thing that should be said about Transient I find is that it has good portions of black metal and doom incorporated into it. From the grainy black-and-white picture of a big city housing block on the album cover to the heavy riffage and the ceaseless, grinding tremolo picking – the album explores the bowels of big city existence, it does not care about the lofty hights. And that’s a good thing, a tremendous thing.
Already with the first riffs on Trajectory you can feel the enormous weight of the world crushing down on your shoulders. When you turn the volume up on this, the riffs take on the quality of thunder. They are the omen of the storm ahead. Down-tuned guitar and bass do their thing, and by the end of the first track you already feel caught in the Moebius loop of transience. Whether the subject here is homelessness, or modern nomads who move from place to place for work, or just the general restlessness in the Western world is not entirely clear. But in line with the initial bad omen, things go from bad to worse and with track number two, Derisive, the Moebius loop turns into a downward spiral. The tunes become mean, menacing, sinister, there is a lot going on. Alienated continues the grinding, and the heaviness in the sound never lets up. While the music does have lighter passages, they are short lived and fleeting; the menacing quality is never lost. You can feel doom constantly hovering above you; you can never relax for long periods of time; you’re constantly on edge. Shattered, the final of the album’s five tracks, starts out with the album’s gloomiest passage. You can tell that things have gone as far as they could and that the foreseeable end is near. Complications set in in the form of a more intricate soundscape. Towards the end of the track, the tempo goes up a few notches, and then the music ends suddenly and abruptly, almost mid-riff. There is probably no need to spell out what that ending represents.
The more I found to like on Transient, the more I wondered what had gone wrong with Ryr’s first album. What had happened? How had this transformation come about? Had they decided to change course, or had I missed something earlier? I went back to Left Fallow but found that I still felt the same way about it that I did two years ago. It annoyed me almost from the get go.
One thing that might account for the change in sound is that recording and the complete postproduction have been done by Jan Oberg, master mind of Earthship, a ballsy sludge/stoner outfit, also from Berlin.
Whatever the reason for Ryr’s transformation in sound, with regard to post metal, today, I would say, the bleaker, the better. Transient certainly follows that principle. Dark and angry it is the best post metal album I have listened to in quite some time.
(8/10 Slavica)
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