Although it would be foolish to ignore Stygian Bough: Volume Ithe collaborative album that Bell Witch released in 2020 with Erik Moggridge of Aerial Ruin, six long years separate the superlative Mirror Reaper of Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gatethe new album from the Seattle duo. Of course, the pandemic has had a lot to do with it, since his different sequences already began to take shape live during his tour with Neurosis and Mono.
If you start the hour with 23 minutes and 16 seconds that makes up ‘The Clandestine Gate’, the only song that appears in this work, they may seem like an imposing peak, even unattainable for which ears, the Americans squeeze all their genius to make it becomes an absorbing and heartbreakingly moving cinematic experience. In fact, I swear to you that as soon as I finished my first dive in it, I did not hesitate to repeat it, to immediately hit the play.
After all, after the two morrocotuda parties that cemented Mirror Reaper, it was sung that the next step for Bell Witch should be the entire album in a single cut. Because they want you to momentarily put the brakes on this crazy race that our lives have become. Dylan Desmond (bass, vocals) and Jesse Shreibman (drums, vocals) want you to stop the machines, park the frenzy and reflect with them on the eternal return, with Nietzsche in the background and Andrei Tarkovsky supervising all visual poetics.
The suspension of each minimal melody has its importance in an expanding, cyclical world, in which existence is as natural as its absence. This truth is that of all of us, and this is the truth of Bell Witch as soon as an organ grows so that, around the fourth minute and a half, a riff that is very familiar to us ends up situating us, indisputably, before the new feat of the absolute dominators of funeral doom.
Coming into their fourth album, the language of the Americans is well known to their fans, but with no shortage of surprises. Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate declines in greatness. In fact, knowing that sooner or later this crescendo instrumentation will destroy your guts does not take away from it a hint of emotion or magnificence.
There is pause, reflection, observation and clairvoyance. Day, night, darkness and blinding light. Majesty from nothing and annihilation before all the meanings that the word life contemplates. This album is anti-establishment, goes against the prevailing and enthroned frivolity. It aspires to annihilate the plasticization of the soul and to resurrect our most hidden and ancestral self.
Placing you on the verge of tears in several moments, transporting you to a universe of raised fists that savor the power and glory of the most gargantuan funeral doom, Bell Witch have once again demonstrated, from the most minimalist modesty, that they are on another musical level and philosophical.
PAU NAVARRA
