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Nadja / Atavist > Infernal Procession... and Then Everything Dies > Reviews
Nadja / Atavist - Infernal Procession... and Then Everything Dies

Ideal introduction to Atavist, Nadja and Satori - 75%

NausikaDalazBlindaz, August 1st, 2010

If you're not familiar with any of the bands featured on this split album then you're the ideal audience for this recording. You may have heard of at least one or two of the bands but maybe were hesitant to hear any of their recordings. In Nadja's case there have been so many recordings and re-recordings of full-length albums plus other releases made in the span of a few years, and not all of these are necessary listening. As for Atavist and Satori, I admit to being unfamiliar with any of their previous releases though I'm aware Atavist deals in droning sludge doom metal so this split album will be a mix of what I know (Nadja) and what I don't know (the other two bands featured here).

Perhaps being the best know of the trio of bands, Nadja leads off first with "Time is our Disease", a long track that has most of the characteristics I associate with Nadja: huge molten slabs of layered and distorted guitar dirge trundling through the space in my head and grinding down any grey matter not previously flattened by other Nadja tracks. The music can be repetitive at times yet it progresses inexorably towards some kind of climax which may or may not eventuate. Early on the singing verges on the whispery and wistful but after the halfway point the vocals acquire a more sinister, even monstrous edge. The music reacts accordingly, becoming thunderous and taking on a kind of doomed magnificence as if a flame is burning brightly and defiantly in the face of an insidious and horrible death. Not a great deal is new to me apart from the treated guitar melody that appears at the end.

Atavist's "Certitude" perhaps suffers from coming second to Nadja's thunder: Nadja can sound quite massive and this has the effect of making Atavist sounding a bit thin and tinny. But what these UK musicians lack in the thickness of the sound, they compensate by investing a lot of passion and conviction in what they do, and they prove to be no less grand and ambitious than Nadja. When Atavist let rip around the 6th minute, they are full of righteous anger and aggression with slashing guitar riffs, sharp and exacting percussion, bared fangs and unsheathed claws. This music certainly commands your attention and holds you rapt all the way in spite of the tinny nature of the production; I think this says a great deal about the care the musicians put into playing and improvising together, and into structuring the track as well. Prior planning with room for improvising make for a long piece of often exhilarating music, especially towards the end when the guitars begin to howl and you feel caught up in an all-embracing howling storm.

Satori present the dark ambient piece "Abyss", an appropriately bleak, murky soundscape with strange unseen creatures chirping indecipherable bug-noise messages. Ghostly tones fade or slide in and out of the blustery soundscape and dust storms get stirred up quite a lot. Not much actually happens during this track - the musicians tend to let the weather buffet you and no more.

Just using the evidence before me here, I'll consider giving Atavist closer attention than I have done so far. I'm betting that their sound isn't always so brittle as it seems here. With Satori, I'm not quite convinced they're worth my time hearing out a whole album: they are good at establishing a definite sound world but I think they need to delve into that world more and extract something out of it to make that world come alive, get a narrative to flow. Doesn't have to be a story, it may be a descriptive narrative detailing what strange things we should look out for as tourists. With Nadja, the track presented here is fairly typical of what they do on their albums and perhaps the musicians are stuck in that awful position where if they don't do anything new or different from the formula, they may risk losing some fans and critics will moan about Nadja going stale, and if they stray from the beaten path, people will complain about them going soft. Personally I'd like to see Nadja break with their formula to avoid sounding generic across their albums.

My biggest gripe with this release is the packaging which doesn't secure the disc (you'll need a plastic slip to carry both) and the folds in the sleeve actually don't accommodate the disc. Cold Spring, surely this recording at least deserves a slip-in cardboard case!

Interesting split from three very different bands - 80%

drengskap, December 30th, 2008

This 1000-copy limited-edition CD was released to commemorate the UK tour of these three bands in November 2008, a tour which I was sorely vexed to miss due to moving house that very week. Infernal Procession… features one long track from each of the bands, adding up to 36 minutes of playing time.

The Canadian duo Nadja open the proceedings with ‘Time Is Our Disease’, a 13-minute piece in which shoegazy ambient influences deliriously collide with huge drone riffs amidst a kaleidoscopic swirl of loops, distortion and whispered, reverbed vocals. Leah Buckareff’s bass work provides a solid bedrock on which Aidan Baker constructs a fantastic opium-haze palace of dreams, which manages to seem both imposingly heavy and devastatingly fragile at the same time. Thick, fuzzy layers of guitar sob and ache under the burden of a vast, oceanic melancholy, whilst huge doom riffs threaten to submerge the listener with their lethal undertow. Trance-out loops of melody hold their timeless, mesmerising sway whilst high guitar lines over the top propel the song relentlessly onwards. It’s just wonderful – captivating, overwhelming, beautiful and brutal all at once, in a way like the finest moments of Swans, but sounding entirely different. I think I'm in love.

Time for a little confession – I've been hearing good things about Nadja from a number of different quarters for a while now, but this track is the first music from the band that I've actually listened to. On the evidence of ‘Time Is Our Disease’ though, I can totally see why people have been urging me to check Nadja out, and I'll certainly be going walkabout in Nadja’s bewilderingly vast back catalogue in the near future.

Next up are the Mancunians Atavist, with another 13-minute piece called ‘Certitude’. Atavist and Nadja are a familiar pairing, having collaborated with on two previous releases, namely 2007’s catchily-entitled 12012291920/1414101, and 2008’s II: Points At Infinity, and the two bands are well-matched in the sense of both producing guitar-based music which is both heavy and experimental. ‘Certitude’ opens with a slow, gentle instrumental intro, before hurling itself into slamming doomy riffs and the ferocious growled vocals of Matt Bartley. Atavist never allow the melody to become completely overwhelmed by the metal, however, and there are periodic reprises of the simple picked guitar line of the intro, reminding me a little of Capricorns, another band which blends doom and progressive influences, although clearly Atavist fit most comfortably into the sludgy lineage of bands like Khanate, Isis and Pelican.

After these two (broadly speaking) post-metal bands, Satori are the wild card, offering nothing in the way of guitar-based rock, but plenty of damnably dark ambient. Their ten-minute track ‘Abyss’ opens with super-slow, distorted vocals, reverberating through a cavernous soundscape, over cyclic, restless layers of sub-bass rumble and mid-frequency drone, the ever-shifting mix acquiring thickening layers of noise as the track progresses, with increasing amounts of textured noise being introduced after the halfway point, along with stray fragments of orchestral strings and brass. ‘Abyss’ features none of the thunderous drumming which has become a bit of a Satori trademark, but it’s an involving and pleasingly malevolent piece of dark ambient nevertheless.

Infernal Procession… comes packaged in a six-panel folded card sleeve with moody black-and-white photography, and here a teeny-weeny bit of criticism does seem to be in order, as the sleeve doesn’t fold correctly for the disc to sit securely in the middle. Still, no biggie – this is a very worthwhile release, and one for which I will be eternally grateful, as my introduction to Nadja in particular.

This review was originally written for Judas Kiss webzine:
www.judaskissmagazine.co.uk