Jute Gyte: " Perdurance"

The first song drew me in. It had me intrigued, then I am not sure what happened. This is the 26th album so plenty of experimentation was needed to perfect the chaos that ensues here. First hearing this created a similar sensation to the one I The first time I heard Liturgy. This is not to say this project has anything in common with Liturgy aside from the fact the both flirt with bastardized versions of black metal. .They test the bounds of noise to a more challenging degree on " Like the Wooodcutter Sawing his hands" where the strangled snarls of the vocals are really the only thing anchoring the sounds to something resembling a song . The rubbery riff in the "Harvesting of Ruins"  that wavering clean guitar tone and what sounds a violin being tortured that leads  sometimes dips into what reminds me more of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, but this project makes that band even seem like pop fodder. The low tuned almost hard core inspired break down like riff. The one man project out of Missouri pushes the bounds of dissonance. A song like "Palimpsest" can almost sound like someone practicing scales with an instrument that is out of tune, before converging into a slow stomping metal riff.

Midway into this crazy album I dispelled the notion that this was black metal or going to fit neatly into any genre.Things do speed up on "Consciousness is Nature's Nightmare", but this acceleration is more of an unnerving drone. The drumming does follow more of a Liturgy like pattern here and there. Sometimes things go into a weird math rock place, but on drugs that make you unable to count. Then there is the surreal haunting of the droid factory that some of the songs descend into . My wife walked into the house while it was playing and said this album sounds like a bunch of nonsense so it is not going to be for every one. The abrasion takes on many forms. The closing song "I am in Athens and Pericles is Young" beats you with a staccato thrashing before weird out on a fractal jam. This builds into something that has a more dinosaur like heaviness, but the production is really weird once you sit down and analyze it through head phones. To say the arrangements are disjointed would be missing the point. Your expectations in regards to songs are beliefs that must be suspended.

This album might be brilliant, but aside from the first song it's not something I can imagine getting much play time out of . I did give this album more than one listen, which might be more than most can get out of it. Still it's hard to ignore the uniqueness of what is going on here, so I will round the album up to a 9. It is the highest score I'll ever give an album I might not listen to again. If you try to make sense of this, which I all too often to with crazier excursions into noise rather than take it in like some might a John Cage symphony. A tolerance for noise and wild experimentation is a must, you have been warned.

 
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