I think that most fair minded people would accept that, love or hate them or any point in between, Neurosis are through innovation and sheer knuckle splitting hard work rightly regarded as one of the true greats of extreme/underground music. They have inspired others to carve out their own path as well as produced some truly classic art like Souls At Zero and A Sun That Never Sets to just pick two at random. And it is art; this is from the soul, stuff in a genre where no one gets to make big studio documentaries about going to therapists.
The other thing is that while they are away you hear similar bands and think “Hey, they’re as good as Neurosis…” and when Neurosis return you feel like a fool for having thought that. An utter fool.
Honor Found In Decay. Is there decay here, or simply age and the knowledge that all succumb to it should they continue to live? You wonder, and that is just the cover, because they never seem to do anything without reason and thought. So where are we?
We begin the music.
Neurosis have a true genius about them. It’s in their touch. Listen to the simple, quiet opening of the album ‘We All Rage In Gold’. A simple sound like a finger drawn around a glass rim. A quiet, lilting and repetitive guitar and bass melody before the drums begin and we find ourselves on a beautifully restrained rise in pressure and intensity. Not a sudden crush, but a smooth slope, pushed by the strained vocals, towards a glow. The touch is precise but emotional, organic, illuminating. In part it’s oceanic; a huge roiling sea full of power sometimes hidden, sometimes crashing against the flood barriers. Other times it’s some huge hand which could crush stone delicately arranging fragile slivers of glass to catch the light.
There is a sense of light to this album. Not a great open sunny day but deep golden rays seeping across the blighted landscape or slowly fanning through half closed blinds in a tenement.
” Blood makes no excuse…” ‘At The Well’ makes this dark point from voice and delicate guitar as we slide towards Neurosis at their classic, crushing, yearning best. The way they layer the music is mesmeric, the huge wall of riff and drum added to bar by bar with some strings, a simple keyboard sound, a discordant noise until the range of perfectly carved sound fills your head. Even by their standards the tone is sombre, bleak and pulsing with an emotion that sways between frustration, angry and giving into despair. But it is so goddamn majestic. The passages that revolve around the cry of “.. In a shadow world..” just blow gasping, gaping wounds through my soul. Utterly, totally transforming.
Religious in the way of a pagan or ecological view wrapped around the world they see about them, this is for me a darker work than Given To The Rising. Long, desolate passages like the opening of ‘My Heart For Deliverance’ keep the despair close at hand even when the clouds break for an almost uplifting organ sound. They change pace in a moment and yet this is not in a sudden jerk; somehow even in those half seconds Neurosis flow. They could build a temple of stone and oak and yet within, holding it together would be found carvings of unbelievable delicacy.
Yeah, they still have the power to move me.
I find the lyrics dense but plainly they are deeply felt. It will be months before I am in a position to offer more than a surface scraping sample of the howl of ‘Bleeding The Pigs’. For the moment the anger will suffice. A sacrifice of blood perhaps to allow the golden ‘Casting Of The Ages’ with it’s classic Neurosis guitar motif and descent into the riff and those edges of harmony and discord that colour it. Wisdom is ancient indeed.
‘All Is Found… In Time’ is a reminder to patience, the apocalypse will come and the surging ocean of ‘Raise The Dawn’ finally returns the sun to the world and with the haunting strings echoing an oriental spirit the ritual is done.
We all know that Neurosis don’t really do bad albums so the question is how good is it? Unlike many I was a bit concerned by Given To The Rising; it was feted by the reviewing industry and by most fans but I found it too passive, somehow. A bit of a step towards the shaman looking wearily towards his retreat and the thought of sleep. For me though something worrying, something disturbing has caught his eye on the path there and the fire is back in his thousand yard stare. The clues will be in the lyrics and their brooding on a modern world where ‘all the one eyed become king’. Is there progression? Neurosis move like tectonic plates and yes there is profession in nuances, in adjustments but if anything this is added to a subtle, deliberate regression, turning back to pick up that stone that fell from the sky, turning it over in their hands to find not just the familiar but what they had missed and then raising their eyes towards the retreat and heading there with renewed purpose. Whatever the truth, Neurosis are not going quietly into a grey dawn. They still do what they do and at times that feels they are the last to hold the world above the abyss and to call the sun down for the good of all and to remind us that all things have consequences in a connected world, and that birth, death and decay are needed for rebirth.
So how good is it?
If you really want to know, cast a glance over my end of year list. In the meantime it’s all about the score here when the album is so much deeper.
(For Neurosis: 9.5/10 For anyone else….? Gizmo)
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