ALC16: #2: Douve by Ehnahre

[mickilennial]

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Douve by Ehnahre
Label: Kathexis
Release Date: January 22, 2016

Yeah, I'm three hours early but I think Tap won't be too mad at me.

So, what I did with my ALC here is I flipped a coin to decide what I wanted to community to invest their time in out of some of the favorites I’ve run into thus far. Don’t mistake this as me scouring RYM’s most hated of the year or anything, I legitimately enjoy this record but whilst it’s not really “accessible” I was curious what our more avant-garde inclined members thought of this avant-garde metal release from this band from Boston that I had no prior knowledge of before coming across them on one of my strolls through RYM ratings.

This is currently one of my favorite metal releases of the year as it sails through death doom riffwork in-between horrific shrieks and more post-modern classical sort of movements. But what does me in with this record is the atmosphere and tone it creates which leads into a pretty engrossing audio experience for me. I’ve listened to it on headphones a few times and through a sound system (quite loudly that a friend of mine was spooked by as well) so I’ve had some time for it to “soak” in. I haven’t really had an uncomfortable listening experience like this since I listened to Nahvalr some years ago and I’m glad I can still feel that kind of shivering uncomfort from a record; there’s not much like it.

Now, I’m not too well-listened on avant-garde music (even metal variants) or at least not on the level I feel like I want to be, so that’s another reason I’m reaching out to see what the community feels about it. So: Satie, DBZ, Pent… any expansive thoughts that you can offer? or anyone else for that matter?

How was the community’s experience?

The album can be streamed on Spotify and on Bandcamp.

[Tap]

This is an interesting pick for sure. There's sort of a vocabulary to metal that I struggle to connect with even when the grammar is deconstructed, like the combination of guitar and drums and voice is engaging but I have difficulty feeling at home in it. I haven't had too much of an issue with anything (cymbals or hi hats or whatever sounded a bit weird in the first that was mostly straight ahead metal but maybe that's just bandcamp stream being a lower bitrate?), but when it gets really far away from metal is when it was really getting me. Like on The Black Princes/Fountain Of My Death, that was sounding like a dronier Senyawa track, I can totally get on board with that. But even in the parts where the metal was deconstructed, I found it to be very admirable and engaging but I don't think I'm really feeling the doom as much as someone with an established healthy relationship with the genre would. But yeah that's more about me than the thing itself, I wouldn't feel comfortable putting a rating on it or anything like that. It's striking though and I'll be checking in with it again this week for sure.

I don't know, I only just went thru the one listen just now and still thinking over some stuff. Like a whole other thing, the piano had an easier sort of tonality than I expected/wanted? like the timbre was pretty clean and the relationships between notes not sounding obvious exactly, but still sort of straightforward. But it was still important that it worked the way it did for the specific vibe that was achieved? So it feels less like a criticism than a preference at the moment. But yeah, curious to hear what other people are thinking on this one, good choice Gowi!

[undefined]

I in no way had some kind of early tip that this was gonna be Gowi's ALC pick but by total 100% uninfluenced happenstance I listened to this very album a few times just before Gowi posted about it. By sheer coincidence. Haha

Anyway, 1 AM spitfire thoughts: this shit is fucking evil. Like in a world where every time I go to the metal section in a record store and see another cvlt as fvck cassette by like Exalted Eviscerator or Dødskyssetingennåde or something, occasionally one costs like $2 so I'll decide fuck it and give it a chance, and overwhelmingly what I find myself with various forms of (black or doom mainly, though this album in question fits firmly into neither designation) metal that attempt to evoke evil or anger or passion or encroaching doom or any of all that good stuff that certain brands of metal often strive to arouse via straight-up aggression and really hazy trashy production, which don't get me wrong works terrifically sometimes (see: 90% of war metal), but Ehnahre evoke similar images and emotions with a focus more firmly on what are ostensibly discordant nightmares but at their core I believe to be just really well-written songs. Sure it's nightmarish as fuck but it's off a subtle variety; even when classical instrumentation and composition comes into play, it never meanders to the level of theatrical nuisance, laughable melodrama, or, even worse, ploy for "art cred". Everything here seems to have been brought into play with one joint purpose of creating an uncompromisingly dark atmosphere that oscillates between extremes of terrifying sparseness and outright claustrophobia (through myriad compositional fuckery all over the place) whilst always maintaining a strong focus on the emotions these jarring arrangements are able to evoke, without ever becoming "avant-garde for avant-garde's sake". Basically it fucked me up but was really interesting, engaging, and in it's own way, subtle* about it, and I'm all about music that does that

*and I think what I mean by that is that although yes it has more than a few moments of blunt in your face growls and CHORDS, it never tries to emphasize or overtly flaunt just how structurally unconventional it tends to be; it remains thoughtful, purposeful, and engaging its eschewing of metal convention such that it transcends "compositionally and intellectually interesting" into "emotionally affecting" very effectively, and with surprising (especially given the album's tendency towards less-trodden structures and instrumentation) sonic consistency

solid pick Gowi. Thanks

[Grzywa]

I'm not too well-listened in any metal genres and only to an extent familiar with avant-garde music, so I can't really figure out how it stands against other works of this kind, but I like the idea of ALC, so I decided to give it a try and went through 2 full listens of the album.

I like its diversity and nonobviousness. Creepy is what strikes you at first, but the more you get into it, you notice the play with rhytms or some cool riffs (At Last Absent From My Head or The Throat Paints Itself). My favourite track seems to be March of the Suns, with that recurrent quiet-loud structure.

I'll surely give it another try, and I hope someone can throw more light on how it compares to other artists/albums of (similar?) genre.
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[benpaco]

Alright I'm gonna be honest, the first track is terrible. I couldn't stop laughing. It's like the soundtrack to constipation, the instrumentals aren't doing enough to redeem the vocal work that is seriously comedic.

The second track, however, was actually really good, reminds me a little bit of that Sisilisko release I liked a couple years back, but I had such a negative reaction to the opening I decided to step away from the album for a bit, and I'm going to go back to it today.
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. . . 2016 . . . 2015 . . .

Things I Make

[RockyRaccoon]

I have to say, I definitely enjoyed this. I did a little Googling and found out that, apparently, this album is supposed to be a song cycle taking you into the mind of a man slowly going insane as he sees the woman he loves slowly die.

I think that that context takes this album a little further with me. It's really effective in creating that feeling, it's a powerful album, so dark and frightening, you can hear the slow descent into insanity as the album gets more and more chaotic until the end where it seems to be less erratic and more chaotically coherent. Like a crazy person after a lobotomy, still lost, still insane, but completely distant, experiencing nothing but pain and anguish.

It ranges anywhere from piano-driven pieces to howling, painful doom-influenced metal. It's unsettling, but simultaneously powerful.

Cool album! Glad you posted it.
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[Satie]

I guess I should disclose a slight bias that I find very forward, announced attempts at synthesis of avant-garde music and genres like metal and prog to almost always be extremely eyeroll-worthy. I don't know what exactly puts me off about these syntheses, but maybe it has something to do with the feeling that musical technique is taking precedence over expression. It's the kind of thing where laypeople get the idea of putting the cart before the horse on other avant-garde music, thinking its rigor in some ways is a replacement for emotive connection across the board because of the incredible exhibitionism these bands have with their formalism.

I tried hard to not let such bias cloud how I approached this album, and my experience hasn't really devolved into the same kinds of feelings I got from (apparently very closely related act) Kayo Dot, so that's good. I definitely don't get Tool vibes from this, I guess I should say. But I still think that Ehnahre's stated goal of making me re-think extreme music or metal or whatever isn't really hitting home for me. What exactly do I need to be rethinking about extreme metal? Bands like Demilich who, granted, weren't as technically proficient or as forwardly academically-minded as Ehnahre apparently are, made a fucking incredible album with Nespithe, and they radically asserted the role of atonality in shaping extreme metal's sound without giving me a press release about that. Those kinds of organic evolutions that keep the source genre in place are more interesting to me than these kinds of things, I guess. I find a lot of the instrumental work in the more metal-oriented songs complicated but not particularly effective, often coming off as clumsy in context and failing to really capture a mood for me. It's the sort of dry group improvisation fostered by dexterity that ECM jazz suffers from in my mind, honestly. The vocals are also terrible, terrible, terrible - absolutely texture-less, effortless, and dull.

It's not all bad, though. The works that incorporate disjointed piano and acoustic guitar improvisation against a backdrop of light percussion work and scraping metal are far from original or fascinating, but they approach an atmosphere and bear a superficial resemblance to a lot of music I've been spending a lot of time with. In general, the more slow-building and airy works that make up large sections of the album are the best parts. The vocals are definitely kind of silly in context a lot of the time, but it's a risk I'm glad Ehnahre took. I'm unfamiliar with their other work, and I'm less familiar with the overall world of avant-garde metal, but it's the first time I've heard those kinds of vocals put into counterpoint with that kind of improvisation (I guess unless you count things like "Wounded One Blurred Among the Leaves," which vaguely resembles a subpar Keiji Haino vocal performance), and it occasionally produces interesting results, even if I don't see myself coming back to this. Honestly, if this were tidied up and condensed and a bit, I could see myself enjoying it more. As is, it's a bloated failed experiment, but a great ride to have taken all the same.

[undefined]

^ you know given what little previous information I had about this album going in, I kinda thought I was gonna be reviewing it similarly, but it struck me as far more organic feeling than a great deal of other avant-garde metal releases I struggle with for the reasons you mentioned. Honestly I agree with nearly all of the premises of your analysis here (to some sizable extent anyway) I just kinda came to a different conclusion

[meccalecca]

Listening to this for the first time, and I'm more or less in agreement with Satie's assessment.

Like hardcore metal and some other genres, the vocals often rub me the wrong way, and detract from my ability to completely like the songs. The more minimal moments remind me a bit of Bohren & der Club of Gore at times, but they definitely have their own thing going on here. Great atmosphere throughout.

If it weren't for the vocals, I think I'd enjoy the album far more than I do.
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[Norman Bates]

Just a bookmark post to remind me I have some catching up to do on ALCs.