One mystery of this album is how a band like Omnia, who seem to belong at folk festivals and nowhere else, could come up with such a beautiful remix of the track Kroppar.

My best answer is that it’s kind of like phenomenon of musicians leaving great bands to make failed solo albums. Individuals can’t always bring the breadth of personality to an album that naturally comes from iterating off the work of other people. So let Omnia rake over material as rich with original character as this, and even they will draw out something so simultaneously soaring and human as their version of Kroppar turned out to be.

It helps to have a front-woman like Anna Katrin Egilstrød, who is equal parts Bjork and Carla Kihlstedt. When she’s on, which is always, her voice spreads irresistible zest into every distorted warble, bleep, buzz or synth note in earshot.

The beats are sometimes defiantly simple, deeply possessed of a strange mixture of contentment and quirk. Seersken plods along for long periods with its trashily upbeat drums and drunken wanderings of distorted flute that sounds as if it were spewing out lovely, spoiled fruit. Each track provides breathing space for its ideas to meander and expand into their glorious, catchy weirdness. I could listen to this all day.

Sometimes giving off a three piece jazz feel, sometimes the 65daysofstatic style electro-postrock, piano rumblings that almost imperceptibly transform into electric channel changing static and back again. The best part of Landmarks is around the eight minute mark, where a schizophrenic but fluttery cascade of piano notes and pattering drums rinse over everything, feeling like rain on your wedding day… on a sunny day. Rain on a sunny day.

It’s remarkable that a 17:20 track can just keep giving. The rest of Deaden the Fields re-treads the same aesthetic so nothing can quite live up to the knockout punch that leads off the album, but there’s some ambitious stuff here.

“We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see—painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them and are willing to let the words go.”

I feel there is no good reason for most repetition in music. The same song could have been written in several billion slightly different ways. The genius of Comity’s The Journey is Over Now is that, in one listen, you seem to be hearing each of those billion different ways at the same time. They can pull apart their own songs from as many different directions as there are neurons. This shakes off the incidental, and keeps the feeling raw and honest. They throw everything they can at you: sometimes it’s a sharp, banjo-clang distortion with pinpoint, Dillinger Escape Plan style starts and stops. Sometimes it’s sand-in-the-gears slowdowns that yield to withdrawn acoustic passages. Throughout everything, there’s a vaguely familiar Coalesce-style metalcore feeling, especially in Part II.

But Part I (yes, that’s its title) does it best, starting with feedback and layers of deep groans which remind me of the vocals from Neurosis’ Falling Unknown. When it gets going, it’s like several different perspectives on the same rhythm being presented simultaneously, the musicians equivalent of a cubist painting. The best part, about 4:40 in, is how the song awakes from its acoustic melancholy with what feels like triumphant emergence from wreckage. The way the melody maintains a sense of soaring triumph, over wide stretch of time, without having repeated any particular rhythm, the way it gets refreshed from different angles, before tumbling into chaos, then into spacious sludge then layerd over with guitar tone transpositions that wander in and out of key is something to behold.

Part III is a bit of a more straightforward instrumental track, with dualing acoustic and electric instrumentation that steadily escalates in intensity. A post-rock band might make something like this the centerpiece of their album, but for Comity it feels almost like filler. Part IV is the 22 minute behemoth that ends the album. It’s much like Part II before descending into what sounds like a sludge merry-go-round, and ending with layered screams similar to Part I.

Despite being wonderfully ridiculous with structural experimentation, Comity sports a sound that’s probably familiar to anyone who has listened to technically precise genres of metal featuring a -core suffix. What’s truly original is their ability to simultaneously maintain senses of chaos and continuity, with just enough distance between the two that your brain is joyfully engrossed in the task of resolving the one to the other.

One would think, of all the islands in the metal archipelago, that Black Metal would be least likely to make the progressive turn. A genre that derives its sense of bleakness from pummeling repetition won’t necessarily have much space for structural variations. And in many moments, Path of Totality leans on you with an oppressive wall of noise. The vocals, always dark, feel like they radiate from a monolith. And it convinces you it will just stay that way. Take the track Passageways. After extracting its pound of flesh, they bust out with Eye-Of-Every Storm style psychedelia at the end, which throws an entirely new light on everything that came before.

Then comes Silent World, which is the inverse. It covers as much ground as a jam by Grayceon, then spends the next half of the song hammering you into the earth. The innovation here is that these variations never feel out of spirit; the gloom has the last word. It’s the fauna of a lonely wasteland. Just enough to lead you in before the darkness closes around you.

http://www.grindcorekaraoke.com/album/nadir

http://www.grindcorekaraoke.com/album/grindcore-luau

http://mattstevens.bandcamp.com/album/relic

So while Upheaval isn’t anything radically new, they do represent the state of the art in a flourishing genre. Track one, The Goat Falls wastes no time acquainting you with their characteristic sound: it’s like thousands of razors meticulously chopping up a laser beam, or at other times like a hyper-precise recording of the inside of a V8 engine that can effortlessly pivot between 0 and 8,000 RPMs.

The most amazing track is the third one, Gardens of Bablyon, which opens and closes with a sound I can only describe as a cross between a waterfall and heavy machine gun fire. The final track, The Third Cycle, is the best example of Upheaval maintaining a thoughtful theme over the course of a song. The vocals are deep and guttural. All I can remember of the drums is the note-for-note mirroring between the double kick and the guitar,

There’s not a note is out of place, no cheap thrills, no real mistake if you’re willing to forgive the occasional breakdown. Incubate the Wasteland is just punishing, visceral technicality with satisfying sense of progression.

But in the context of doom and post-metal, I’d like to think I’m sufficiently acquainted with the genres that I would know what to look for by now. Throw in the fact that I’ve absolutely loved pretty much everything Giant Squid has released up to this point, and you can start to see the problem I’m getting at. I’ll come back to that.

Right from the start of Tongue Stones, the opening track to Cenotes, you notice how different the reverb-enveloped cello sounds compared to their previous work, the Ichthyologist. A minute later comes the low-growling guitar. It too is different, and struts about in a grand imperial march, giving you a chance to take in the architeuthisian malevolence of the distortion. It works well in slow pulses, but can mumble as it works with the cello to express even moderately sophisticated ideas.

But by the time we get to Aaron Gregory, wailing “A crawling lake of brine, thick with oil, thick with blooooooooooooood” it’s stunning. It’s as if he’s realizing his own insanity right as he lets out the words. His performance here is one of the high points of the album, and establishes once and for all that Aaron Gregory has the most captivating voice you’ll hear anywhere in post-metal. It’s enough to carry the song and inflect everything around him with force.

Snakehead, with its melancholy vaguely egyptian arpeggios, is the treat of the EP. Never too bombastic, the first half like a brisk folk ride. But when it blooms, when it expands into the beast of a song you’d expect from Giant Squid, it just doesn’t have the power we’ve become accustomed to. Everything is mixed into the background, which is a damn shame because the ideas here are as well thought out as anything Giant Squid has done.

As it stands, the peaks and valleys of Cenotes occur within a narrow tonal spectrum: no change seems to venture more than 5 feet from what came before. Now, to my original point. Repeated listens definitely do serve to shake off a layer of dust and help you better appreciate the album. But something about the whole mix sounds muted, as if the guitar is mixed into the background and sapped of its former all-engulfing power. A track like Figura Serpentinata just doesn’t sound heavy- in fact it almost sounds like the intro music to the Nintendo game Double Dragon & Battletoads. And the cello rarely sounds emotionally in sync with the rest of any given song.

Cenotes will reward repeated listens, but even when it really needs to, it never overwhelms you with power. I regret to say it, but this EP fell well short of my hopes.