Labels: Crucial Blast
Review by: Alex Hannan
EHNAHRE announce themselves as well-read avant-metalheads by drawing on Samuel Beckett for their lyrics, which are based on “Old Earth” from Beckett’s “Fizzles” collection. The fairly minimalist text is allied with music by turns austere and expressionistic, heavy but not particularly hook-driven. Parts of it sound collectively improvised. The record is refreshingly slow-paced, and each section of the whole unfolds gradually.
They’re essentially a power trio, although the bassist also plays double bass and keyboards, and Ricardo Donoso is credited with percussion and electronics rather than drums. Each player is comfortable playing solo, in pairs or in ensemble and large sections of the record are methodical explorations of solo or duo sound-worlds. Much of it is played in free rhythm rather than following a constant pulse, which gives all the greater impact to the climactic moments when everyone hits it together, and there’s a lot of interesting individual work going on which keeps the record from dragging. On the CD the album is divided into 4 unnamed tracks, but the second and third run on directly and it seems to be thought through as a whole.
The opening of the first track evokes old crackly 78s laden with static echoing in a dank cave: guitars enter around the four minute mark, freely timed atonal lines reverbing into the distance. A tortured manic voice spiders in: the band blasts in together after nearly eight minutes, guttural roaring and sheets of distortion alternating with the bare spikes of guitar which marked the opening. A brief return to eerie calm. Finally, after ten minutes, the first hints of metre start to come in, never settling for that long. The piece has a free-sounding approach to structure which really complements the dark solo textures and feels anything but predictable.
Towards the end of the first section the riffs start to feel a little more stonerish, the vocals begin to dominate and the last half a minute consists of resonating deep chugs topped with a peaking of vocal intensity. For me this is the weakest section of the album – the vocal style here doesn’t command the same interest as the instrumental parts and so to foreground this element with minimal backing makes the vocals sound forced and the overall sound unbalanced.
There’s a brief pause before the second section begins – this part is instrumental and opens with a bowed double bass part. It’s expertly done – intonation good and playing flexible. It’s a hard instrument to play an interesting solo on… It’s joined by a guitar, which eventually starts to dominate around the 3:30 mark. Flutterings of percussion appear. This becomes the most fully orchestrated section of the CD, with drums, subtle keyboards (presumably overdubbed) and trumpets all contributing to a flowing, dreamlike section with waves of percussion rather than precise coordination. There’s a gradual building of intensity and the distortion gets stomped around the 10 minute mark, leading straight into part III, which comes the closest to conventional metal song form in riffs and rhythm, but still constantly breaking down, mutating and returning. A funereal trudging rhythm starts in the bass, swamped every now and then by guitar and bass.
I’m not aware of many bands taking this kind of approach to death metal – using an improv-inflected construction, a symphonic sense of scale, great sense of textural variety to achieve effects and sensations very much still in the orbit of the genre. It’s very different to the stylistically scattershot approach of Zorn-style avant metal, for example. This is a powerful piece of music – hope to hear more from EHNAHRE soon.