VYGR - Hypersleep

It's kismet, karma, predestination, Newton's Third Law, Ørlǫg, Wyrd...

It's very definitely Doom, in its middle English and musical definitions: a preordained, generally negative or dreaded, outcome and a slow-moving, ugly sub-genre of heavy metal.

We've just got our hands on Hypersleep by VYRG, which we've previewed moderately ecstatically before...

The universe felt the jonsing here. The universe responded, one might daresay, rather expansively... (hence the above thesaurus-fest).

Hypersleep, it turns out, sounds like:

Cthulhu, drunk on peyote-laced nepenthe.

VYGR, elsewhere, have been called space rock, doom metal, ambient sludge-- but they're truly Epic Narrative Sludge or Tripped-Out Sci-fi doom: Hypersleep sounds like a sci-fi movie soundtrack, with sludge:

VYGR's use of space is one of the more distinct elements of their sound, beyond the sheer weight of the riffs
First track, "Solar," practically a snippet at two minutes-- at 1:38 proceeds spiderly, shimmering background tiny string leads, suggests the end of "The Thing That Should Not Be"....

"Flares" opens with Riff of Riffs, yet also (perhaps it's the keyboards in the background), sounds like it could be the soundtrack for the horror movie Terrence Malick will never make... the verse riff has a great fourth-based harmony that sounds maudlin and exultant at the same time, somewhat like Galactus playing Barber's Adagio for Strings... and at 3:26 there it is, the Pink Floyd phased-out/ flanged-in lick in E... perfectly compliments the heaviness... VYGR know to break the heavy periodically so when they get back to it, it seems even heavier... like letting someone you're waterboarding up periodically, instilling hope, and crushing again when they go back under....

That simile may not seem like it, but it's a fun experience, that....

 trudge, yet gracefully.

"Orbital Hallucinations," aka A Riffed Out Dark Side of the Moon, encapsulates the sound here overall: nightmare alternate-universe soundtracks to the original Solaris, or the underrated Pandorum....

There are obvious similarites to Isis and Pelican-- but whereas Pelican's dominant mood is maudlin, or melancholy, VYGR's is dread and exultation-- like a brave-yet-scared-shitless cosmonaut who lost contact with his mother ship, but may be drifting to a previously-undiscovered planet....

"Galactic Garbage," at around 4:00 hits what can only be described as a "leaden harp" section... majestic, 10-story harp of all gods, being fought over by Dionysus, Pan, and Kulitta... and at 4:44 exactly, drastically changes, yet retains the same melody-- like Cthulhu suddenly tired of watching the previous three fight and tore it from their insignificant hands....

Track 6, "-", a sweeper at 33 seconds, with its stirring, ambient sounds, like droids sleeping off nightmares....


"The Hidden": moody, sad, at 4:40 takes a breather and mourns... stately and funereal in its dignified pacing... triumphant and sad, the bittersweet ending of an epic trilogy....

"Shapeshifters," in its seeming familiarity, cements what was creeping up on our unconscious... the mighty music here is also catchy... 5:28 lays down RIFFness, like Cthulhu has had enough and destroys it all... as you watch... rapt.... as it fades to silence, and black, and diminuendo screaming....

"Unmoved Mover" and its twin guitar harmonies over a slug-trailing-blood riff: Iron Maiden risen from the depths to destroy the humans at Poseidon's bidding... then around 2:15 lopes off, into the depths, alone, existentially despondent, after its pillaging....

"Path to the Unknown" ushers in "Event Horizon" with bell-like acoustic guitars that become the rumble of a train next door... "We Drift" opens with spacey whale calls and palm-muted lurching riffs....

We end with "A Distant Beacon," with the encroaching silence and darkness, the gaining lack of light, with static and a sonar blip, as we feel total stillness and its approach.


--Horn


[Maybe the best illustration of the mix of sounds and ideas on Hypersleep was shown by my computer (fittingly): as I write, it picks up words and tries to link them to other sites, usually forming an overall theme; all the links it got from the above text were so varied, with little to no discernable patterns emerging, that while I was writing it finally just opened a pop-up window that said "Holy Jesus, what is this fucking article about?" True story.]

creator-destructor records site: www.creator-destructor.com/store.php

VYGR bandcamp: vygr.bandcamp.com/

Earth -Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1

Here's the thing:

There's an expression in creative writing circles: "Book characters should talk more like actual people, and actual people should talk more like book characters."

What I like about this idea is the exchange of expectation-- taking one idea (people in books tend to talk like poets, much more memorably that real people do) and trading it for another, opposite idea (people in real life should try to talk more memorably than actually occurs).

I apply a similar rule to listening to (and by extension, judging) music: I like all forms of music, but usually listen only to metal or jazz.

And I don't know if you're familiar with stereotypical metal versus jazz fans; they're usually polar opposites. Metal is often anti-intellectual ("Does it rock or not?!"), and jazz tends to be the reverse, overthinking everything ("I found his use of progressive thirds intriguing") and not generally concerned with whether Paul Motian's new album rocks (or swings, as they say).

I try to exchange expectations between criticism of these two genres. I try to get the "feel," the guts, of jazz (ignoring music theory unless it's relevant to the Rawk factor), and then analyze metal.

Jazz has plenty of people who'll analyze the shit out of a chord progression, but very few who'll try and rock out with it. Metal, on the other hand, has scads of leather-clad Visigoths who don't give a second thought to the most basic music theory tenets (for example, did you know that the main riff from "Raining Blood" is a diminished scale in E flat?), but will sure as hell tell you if the new Havok album "fucked my face off," as the terminology goes. The two approaches are due for an exchange.

And maybe you don't give a wildebeest's butthole about theory, and just wanna know if something rocks or not. If so, you should skip down a bit, because I'm about to go up my own butt on this motherfucker.

First, preamble: I listen to different genres of metal for different reasons. Thrash is for aggression and driving fast, black metal is for rage and catharsis, doom/sludge/stoner is for feelings of might, and drone music like Earth (or Sunn O))) or Alcest), while having stoner applications, is for darkness-- for a trance-like, sleepy state of relaxation.

Yup, relaxation. You can listen to Earth loud as shit (like Sunn O))) in concert), but it's still calming. Like standing on a heavy-breathing giant that you know has your back.

I call this doze metal. Dream metal. Lunesta metal.

And this music has a ton in common with jazz, specifically the type of jazz you probably think of if you don't listen to much jazz-- e.g., John Coltrane or Miles Davis. (Though notlike Cynic, Atheist, or later-period Death, which are more like jazz fusion, à la Weather Report). Coltrane and Davis, in addition, are both renowned (in part) for their modal jazz.

Short version: modal jazz sits on one or two chords for awhile. It tends to be slow and take its time. It gives a soloist time to spread out and relax into it, rather than having to sprint between chord changes (like guitar soloists in thrash metal would have do to, for example).

Earth, and their new Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 (released 2/22) are modal metal.

Earth has time.

Earth has fuuuuuuuckloads of time.

They are not. in. a. hurry. to. get. anywhere. Sometimes, they don't actually "go" anywhere at all.

If you have the time, you will love this album.

If you're in a hurry, you will hate this album.

Earth's last record, The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull (even their titles take time), was laconic to the point of petrification, and, with its undistorted heavy string guitars, often could've passed for background music in a Sergio Leone western.

The first four tracks off of Angels... follow a similar blueprint, though having evolved that sound without fundamentally changing it: a cello pervades the music, sometimes in the background, sometimes fore, and makes the sounds more gentle and more bittersweet than previously.

This is reminiscence metal.

The cello particularly, and the overall instrumentation in general, gives "Old Black," "Father Midnight," "Descent to the Zenith" and "Hell's Winter" a mournful whimper; the dominant, sometimes only chord in the songs lend themselves to single-tone singalongs, aka mantras and chants; Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 is an hour-long farewell, like ice in the sun falling from a roof.

The instrumentation is eclectic and impressive: cello, electric and acoustic basses and Dylan Carlson's twangy clean-channel telecaster. Promotional materials mention that Earth put "a greater emphasis on improvisational songwriting tactics," which help explain the sparse arrangements. It might also explain why the last piece, the 20-minute title track, is the most absorbing and clearest evolution in Earth's sound.

There are rarely drums in it, and the piece is rubato (without definite time) for much of its length. (Try and tap your foot to it.) It changes and morphs and slides in and out of time and then key; it's the musical equivalent of the goo in a lava lamp. Earth seem to love sevenths-- "tense" notes, that beg to be resolved and make it uncomfortable when they aren't. Like a very quietly argumentative man, who suddenly and periodically comes to some kind of angering conclusion (like the jarring string rakes at 10:50).

Frankly, just the fact that they used some degree of improvisation (like jazz) is reeeeeeeally cool.

Overall, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 is miraculously "blank." Very little happens, but (if you're patient with it) you won't want to stop listening. Soloing over it, it would be nearly impossible to find a wrong note or even a wrong sound; all are welcome.

On Earth©, this is the way the world ends: not with a headbang but a whimper.

--Horn

Buy here: Angels of Darkness Demons of Light 1
Buy here mp3: Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light 1