That ‘A New Nature’ was funded by fans via PledgeMusic shows just how popular crowdsourcing has become, and it’s interesting to see a band like Esben and the Witch, having departed from Matador to take such a route instead of chasing another label. It’s also telling of the band’s trajectory that the album was recorded over a fortnight in Chicago with Steve Albini. It’s not entirely surprising that the legendary audiophile has helped the band to produce an album that reveals new depths and yields maximum impact where it matters.
The opening bars consisting of a lone chiming, transistor amp warm guitar is pure old school post-rock. But then this is Esben and the Witch, and ‘New Nature’ announces its arrival with the 10-minute epic that is ‘Press Heavenwards’, which is of course where the soaring guitars soon set their sights amidst a rising tension that builds to a tumult of noise and Rachel Davies’ vocals wander, desperate and alone through the tempest.
The ethereal folk of ‘Dig Your Fingers In’ climaxes in a scorching avalanche of guitar noise. The goth-tinged ‘No Dog’ is another breathtaking journey through emotional and sonic dynamics, with moments of mesmerisingly beautiful delicateness rent by thunderous barrages of bass, drums and guitar. It all pales against the 14-minute ‘Jungle’, a magnificently atmospheric piece that’s haunting in its bleakness at the start, builds to a slow-burning mid-point crescendo and eventually arriving at the climax it always threatened. It’s little short of perfect in the way it develops and transitions from one part to another.
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The bleak, crushing deluge of ‘Those Dreadful Hammers’ is monumental, and what it lacks in duration compensates in intensity – and we’re still only five tracks into the eight. If ‘Blood Teachings’ offers some respite with its slow, hypnotic sway – at least until it reaches its raging climax that blisters and burns and hurtles toward sonic oblivion at a hundred miles an hour.
‘Wooden Star’ swaggers, staggers and drifts through a haze of dreamy folky post-rock to arrive in a pool of supple shade that makes way for the delicate and unexpectedly soft final track, the short but ever so sweet ‘Bathed in Light’.
‘A New Nature’ is an incredibly cohesive effort, that explores the balance between light and shade, hard and soft, the pulversingly heavy and cloud-like levity. These contrasts and oppositions, these poised dynamics and diametric tensions are core to Esben and the Witch’s sound, and make ‘ A New Nature’ one of the most compelling albums of the year so far.
Esben and the Witch Online
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