the first not related to a classical element – their albums have represented fire (Remission), water (Leviathan), earth (Blood Mountain) and ether (Crack the Skye). Musically, two of the most gentle ideas of their entire output are represented in the title track and the aforementioned closer, The Sparrow. Brann also gets his first full writing credit and solo vocal spot on the track Creature Lives, something that the drummer is very keen to talk about…
“It was something I wrote on a keyboard in my house,” he says proudly, “Thing is, if you’re a drummer and you write something on a keyboard it’s hard to justify bringing it in!” he says, clearly relishing the memory. “It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do. Luckily, Troy (Sanders, bass/vocals) was really into it, and learned it on bass so, one day, when Brent didn’t show up as he was sick, and Bill (Kelliher, guitar) wasn’t there - and the engineer was paid to be there all day - we thought we’d do something. It’s probably my favourite song on the record. It’s kind of bizarre. What the fuck is that song? I like that aspect of our band that we can put out something out and not shy away from it. ‘Oh that’s not what people expect from us so let’s not put it out.’ We own it and say ‘this is us!’”
The song begins with eerie Moog noise and sampled laughter, recalling Pink
Floyd’s On The Run from Dark Side Of The Moon, before gradually building to a huge crescendo with triumphant harmonies and the ringing melody marching across them. Brann’s song stands out from the rest of the record but it’s tough to be surprised by a unit that has always stretched themselves. Brann reckons that the removal of the conceptual safety net was fun, and opened the songs up far more. “It was a nice change. I think we’d gone as far as we wanted to go in the direction of the prog rock concept album.” As the music was mostly already written for The Hunter, there’s the usual twists and turns, but its arguably their most straightforward set of songs with riffs and melodic
passages played upon and prolonged rather than abandoned for the next two minute long wig-out. Stargasm’s spacey guitar arpeggio is one of the highlights. The Sparrow grows gently from a stately, almost melancholy pace before transmuting into a powerful lumbering weight that starts on tip toes and then begins pushing through the trees with a purpose. There’s greater use of the three vocalists too, already a natural progression for the band. The regular guest vocal from Scot Kelly, the lead vocalist with metal band Neurosis, appears on the furious Spectrelight. Octopus Has No Friends filters the verse vocals through a Vocoder while All the Heavy Lifting has the potent lyrics, “We didn’t come this far just to turn around/we didn’t come this far just to run away.” But there’s no hiding from it; this is an album born out of necessity. “The album was not only a kneejerk reaction to the two years of touring Crack the Skye – which was also a deep emotionally- charged record,” says Brann, who has previously confessed to a lot of the songs on that record stemmed from his struggle to save his own teenage sister, Skye, from death. She committed suicide when they were both teenagers. “We just wanted to get away from the heavy issues that were at hand while writing the record. We used the songs on the record to get away from what was happening.” With no restrictions, the four simply used the escapism to inject their music with a healthy dose of humour rather than force out the pain through a heavily convoluted storyline, gracing the songs with a lightness not afforded them before. However, fans of the band’s behemoth-sized riffage won’t find themselves exactly short changed, either; the four song run of Black Tongue, Curl of the Burl, Stargasm and Blasteroid is an exhausting sprint through a lexicon of brutally intricate guitar interplay. Each record so far has
broadened the very idea of what metal is. Remission merely redefined what modern metal can achieve with extended technical, melodic and rhythmic breakdowns. Leviathan powered weighty but light-footed riffs through dense structures topped
“We wanted to abandon the ‘concept’ idea and instead sing about some other stuff: freaks running about the woods with chainsaws…or having sex in space!”
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