Week 7 of 52 albums for a year
Black Aleph - Apisades
Hello everyone, I hope you're having a great week.
This weeks album was Apisades by Black Aleph. This is a post rock album I heard the first song of last year but didn't get a chance to listen to it all until now.
It's a short album, clocking in at around 30 minutes long, but I loved it, it hits me in all the right spots. It's got an epic and spiritual sound to it that really grew on me. It's got some very heavy moments, especially the start, but it goes through a lot of changes as the album progresses. It never gets truly 'light' or 'airy' but there are a ton of dynamics. There's a middle eastern flavour to the sound and I really found myself enjoying it.
The first track, Descent sets a great tone for the album, you can feel the sound engulfing you. It's easy to imagine yourself walking into a dark cave with a flaming torch to try and light the path ahead. It's borderline doom/drone metal, and sounds great when you can turn it up loud. Ambit I (Ascension) sounds like you'd expect, like you're climbing something vast. You can hear that it's not going to be an easy climb, but you grit your teeth and go for it.
There's a creepiness to Ambit II (Aphelion) that sounds like the feeling you get when you slowly wake up from a nightmare and it's fading away into the dust of memory. It's not a calming sound, but you feel relived as the song's intensity eases.
The ending of Precession is epic. The slow build from around the 3:45 mark, that to me is the postrock sound that I love. On first listen, I didn't love Return. But once again, that's where the (minimum) 5 listens per week comes in. At a certain point I found I enjoyed the song, and it sits really nicely coming after the heaviness of Precession.
As a whole there's a solemnness throughout a lot of the album, it sounds ancient and mythic to my ears. But in the last song, Occultation, there's moments that give me a cosy feeling, like it's Christmas time and people are happy and laughing. Of course that feeling gets slowly enveloped by the void, the impenetrable wall of doom that soaks into this album, but it's a fantastic dynamic and makes the heavier parts, well, heavier.
As for the performers, it's got Timothy Johannessen, Peter Hollo, and Lachlan Dale. I'll be honest, I've never heard of the first two, but I've met Lachlan a few times when he toured in Melbourne with Hashshashin. He is also the manager of the label Apisades was released on called Art As Catharsis. AAC have released a ton of music I enjoy and I think I first heard about this album through a newsletter at some point when they released a single.* Going by the liner notes, it was recorded by Tim Carr from We Lost The Sea who are probably my favourite post rock band. If you like interesting weird music, check out that label. There's some real gems.
Seeing as it's a short album with no lyrics, I won't bang on any more. To my ears, this is the sound I love, so I'm gonna give it a full fisting: 5/5 fingers. It's the kind of album I can see myself playing over and over, especially when I'm diving into writing projects or going on long, lonely drives in the vast spaces.
I really recommend giving this a listen if you want to have a soundtrack for your day or if you're going to spend sometime outdoors with some beautiful scenery.
The year so far:
I’m going to be heading off soon on a bit of a drive across the country. If anyone has any albums they recommend that I check out please send them through!
*Rant time. I don't like how bands release singles without releasing the whole album. I understand that's how people market music now to get traction around a couple of songs before you hear the whole thing, but I find it frustrating when I hear something I really like but I can't hear the whole thing. That's why it took me so long to hear this album. I heard the single (from memory just before I set off on a road trip) but couldn't buy it straight away. Then when it actually came out I was busy and forgot (and again, from memory it was shortly after I had returned from a road trip and had lost the window). Had I have been able to, I'd have bought it on day 1. I know it’s not new, and it was common years ago to hear a couple of songs on the radio before the album came out. I guess for me though, I’d rather things just got released as a whole.
But hey, that's just how life is I guess.