Ba’al summon forth turmoil and catharsis on their sophomore full-length!
I know I talk a lot about genre in my reviews, mostly because I’m fascinated by it as it can be the difference between you choosing one album over another, sometime you can agree and sometimes you disagree, it’s getting increasingly harder to classify modern music due to the willingness of bands nowadays to play what they like, rather than stick rigidly to one genre, well, some bands do anyway! The new album by Sheffield-upstarts Ba’al The Fine Line Between Heaven and Here is an album which laughs in the face of such things as being confined to genre stereotypes.
It cherry picks particular sounds for specific reasons within the confines of each song, and it does so masterfully, the album emerging fully formed from its chrysalis of inception ready to take flight into an unsuspecting world. For some reason, I keep thinking of a car salesman trying to sell it to unsuspecting punters “you want Black Metal, Doom Metal, orchestral passages, Post-Metal, heck, you even want Ambient Music” (he slaps the hood) “This baby does the lot, and it does it amazingly well too!”
The opening song “Mothers Concrete Womb” eases you in gently, a small tremor, elegant piano notes, shimmering like moonlit reflections caused by a small stone dropped into a lake, before those small ripples increase, forming waves, forming a tsunami of noise. It’s cinematic, it’s elegant, it’s sweeping, it’s majestic and it’s bloody brilliant. The ebb and flow of the song is a condensed microcosm of everything which makes this album so bloody good.
The genre-hopping is threaded through the tapestry of the whole album, woven into its very core. Nowhere is more evident than on “Waxwork Gorgon” with its industrial dread, hammer blows sparks illuminating the Grunge, exploding into Post-Black malevolence, morphing into delicate Folk passages, it’s thrilling in the best way possible, not done for the sake of it, but intricately thought through.
It would also be remiss of me not to mention all 13,5 minutes of “The Ocean That Fills a Wound”. An epic which shuffles through Shoegaze haze, tip toes through haunting orchestral flourishes and a metallic wave which crashes over the unsuspecting wanderer, ripping the feet asunder. Swirling dissonance coalesces with feral vocals in a maelstrom of aural violence, almost stunning in its brutality, yet it still takes you by the hand, whispering with that all important glimmer of light, hope and rays of corpuscular sunshine.
This isn’t just a heavy album sonically, it’s a journey into the soul, an internal inspection, ripping bare your inner-most thoughts and desires, exposing everything it has to offer, the light as well as the dark, it’s a heady brew which I implore you to take. This album carves out something original, visceral and profoundly moving. If you are looking for music which wraps you in shadow before delivering gut punch catharsis The Fine Line Between Heaven and Here delivers. If you hold nothing back, fully give yourself over to it, it’ll grip you like few others, a stunning piece of work.
