If the recently re-released ‘Sovereign’ EP demonstrated Neurosis’ more subtle side and a propensity for slow-building dirges, then ‘Honour Found in Decay’, their tenth full-length album, leans toward a greater immediacy. This is nowhere more evident than on the megalithic opener, ‘We All Rage In Gold’, a veritable storm of a track built on tidal wave guitars and the relentless crash of punishing percussion. ‘I’ll walk into the water /to wash the blood from my feet...”
of course, immediacy is a relative term: the majority of the tracks here are epic in every sense, not least of all duration. Neurosis pillage the banks of bleakness on the ten-minute ‘The Well’: existential exhortations dominate the lyrical content as Scott Kelly howls into an eternal abyss, ‘all we are is blood’. The anguish is unstinting, and they don’t pander to short attention spans with short songs either. There are, it has to be said, melodic, anthemic moments, in ‘My Heart For Deliverance’, but running at a fraction short of twelve minutes, it’s no pop song and no picnic, either.
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There’s a rich, earthy quality to both the music and its performance. Ancient mists swirl around the folk-tinged motif that opens ‘Casting of the Ages’, before leaden guitars, hewn from mines of despair by cracked hands crash on through like a landslide.
Steve Albini’s production is predictably stunning: if anyone was capable of capturing the full sonic force of Neurosis and making the drums hit like battering rams against crumbing castle walls, it’s Albini, and it’s clear why the band have enjoyed a longstanding relationship with the master of analogue. It really is a marriage made in the subterranean darkness some distance beneath the earth’s surface, and ‘Honour Found in Decay’ is a glorious triumph.
Neuros Online
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