Listening to this album through headphones is recommended. This album is an event. It opens with a 21-minute song. You guys know how I feel about songs like this, and even Michael Gira could stand to trim the fat at times. "The Healers" sounds like what the band at a Pentecostal church might do when waiting on a word of the lord during the prophecy and prayer part of their tent revival. Given the title, I would not put it past Gira that this is the point. When the groove kicks in, they create a powerful dynamic that harkens back to the '90s golden years of the band.
Gira's vocals drop lower, but despite the resonance in them, it's more speaking in tongues combined with throat singing than the croon that was the powerful narrative of their best work. The thing you can count on these guys for is a hypnotic drone, and that is the mood it creates. It gets jammy about 11 minutes in, but the narcotic groove is pretty enthralling. 16 minutes in and everything is thrown into chaos and noise for a spastic burst. I rarely need a paragraph to talk about a single song, much less two of them, but here we are.
The shimmering ambient buzz that ends the first song bleeds over into "I am the Tower", which finds Gira back in his spoken word mania that marked the band's 2010 reformation material. Melody slowly unfolds from this that recalls the later part of their 90 output. The beautiful sonic material they lock into makes it worthwhile. This makes them who they are is the ability to make the drone pay off. They are one of the few bands that can deliver it like this. At 71, I am not really asking Gira to do more than he did after Bowie died at 67, so there is not a great reference point for how singing into your 70s should sound, taking Mick Jagger out of the equation. This is not the same rock n roll; in fact, it's supposed to be everything the Stones are not.
The title track is even longer than the first song, only by a minute, but a 22-minute song is still an ample investment of time. The first two minutes are intro ambiance that boils into darker rock dissonance. At the four-minute mark, they ring into the lush sonic purpose of their 90s sound, just without Jarboe, whose absence might be an understandable sticking point for some. But it's hard to argue against the expansive ache of the guitar melodies that unfold here, with Gira's spiritual vocal intonation acting like a Buddhist chant. Midway into the song, it breaks into a fragile lullaby. Further proof that post-rock would not exist without these guys. This flows into the band's more strummed folk side, but doused in the kind of ambiance they are known for.
The whispered cadence of Gira's vocals creates a creepy cultic chant that sounds like a surreal 60s horror movie soundtrack opens "Red Yellow" at under seven minutes long it's hypnotic groove that is more sustainable, and it crosses the line from sonic splendor into actual songwriting. The drums have almost a Led Zeppelin-like throb to them. This feels like the best song these guys have done in a few albums to me. "Guardian Spirits' mixes the experimental layers of sound from "the Seer" with their darker 90s feel. The vocals owe a little more to his "Seer" days as well. There is also a little bit of the industrial clanging from the earlier days, though not nearly as angry. The drumming gets intense as the song builds.
"The Merge" throws harsh noise at you that leads into a pretty cool noir bass line. Is it going to be another 12 minutes of cool? Well, we shall see. Brass and guitar creep in to join it. Jazz is incorporated more into this song than anything I can recall hearing from these guys. This I bookended by noise before things grow darker. They ride off this swelling wave of ambiance. In the last three minutes, it drops down to the lo-fi folk that is a staple of Gira's writing process. The last song builds from the post-rock like minimalism, riding the ringing tension of the guitars. At 19 minutes, it's the album's fourth-longest song. Approaching the three-minute mark guitars begins to make more ambient sounds. This continues to build for six minutes until it begins to sound like a song coming to life. They ride this for five minutes before ebbing down. They they building it back up again. It follows these peaks and valleys for the song's duration, with vocals more as a textural accent. In the last 3 minutes, he returned to the folk feel again. I will give this album a 9.5, as it is not their best work, but it remembers to employ similar moods that bring them closer to the more classic sounds of the Jarboe era.
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