When Neurosis made their surprise return with An Undying Love For A Burning World, a good friend of mine kept asking me why I had not gotten around to writing a review. The answer is pretty simple, much like Swans, there’s something about Neurosis that requires an emotional commitment that I simply wasn’t able to give at the time of its release. With everything in my life, the album felt too overwhelming to tackle and so, I must confess, I retreated from it, waiting for the moment where I felt I could address it with the confidence it deserves.
I’m glad I waited.
For those who live their lives through and by music, hearing the right album at the wrong time can forever define what that record means to you and, when it comes to Neurosis (and especially with the band returning after an absence of seven years), this wasn’t something to approach from the wrong angle.
And so here we are, some five months after the record dropped, like a sonic atom bomb, on an unsuspecting public, finally experiencing what many have had coursing through their synapses since March, and the experience is every bit as seismic as I might have hoped.
It opens, not with a cataclysmic riff, but with the echoing We Are Torn Right Open, which finds an overlapping mantra delivered over steadily building feedback. It lands, as a scream from the void tells us, “the dissonance is deafening”, on the stabbing, mechanistic horror of Mirror Deep, which has a propulsive, proto-industrial feel that is deeply unsettling. Imagine some hell-bound slave galley rowing across the divide between earth and hell, and you’ll have some idea of the track’s throbbing brutality. Yet, when it breaks down, as surely it must, there’s real beauty here too, with chiming guitars and keyboard swells nodding to the beauty of Harvest Man. It may only be the eye at the heart of the storm, but it’s incredibly beguiling nonetheless, and it leaves the listener all the more unprepared for the sonic onslaught that follows. Put simply, it is an immense opening, and it finds former ISIS singer Aaron Turner slotting right into the line-up as if he’d always been there.
Having comprehensively rearranged the listener’s nerve endings, Neurosis offer a brief moment of calm before unleashing the mid-tempo riff of First Red Rays. With its creeping synths, molten riffs, and dynamic pauses, it’s not unlike an extreme take on the dark recesses of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, and it does much to showcase the band’s ability to pair the most belligerent of riffs with a cinematic sensibility that is entirely engrossing. This is especially true in the more progressive second half of the track, which finds the band exploring evocative landscapes, before unleashing a final riff that lands with all the force of a volcanic eruption.
No less epic is Blind, a lengthy exploration that emerges from a sea of unsettling sounds to rupture the listener’s spleen with a riff of exceptional potency before devolving into neo-ambient noise. It’s exactly these sorts of digressions that make Neurosis so special, not least because it’s almost impossible to guess on first listen just where the band will take you. Here, it’s to a place of unearthly beauty where, for all the lingering sense of threat that seems to throb in the atmosphere, you can’t help but let your guard down and let the music wash over you. Of course, you do know that it will eventually turn on you, as indeed it does, but much of the fascination is to see when and how the band manage the twists and turns even as you’re being bludgeoned into submission.
Rather more direct is Seething And Scattered, which rips and tears at the listener as Aaron and Steve trade vocal jabs with punkish fury. Here the track takes us on a different direction again, in parts recalling the eerie remixes ISIS commissioned for Oceanic, with its cyclical synth parts and rolling toms. In stark contrast, the four-minute Untethered simply unloads, albeit with a slightly psychedelic undercurrent that implausibly nods to both Spiritualized (in the opening beats) and The Who (in the rippling synth). Of course, Dave Edwardson’s cruelly distorted bass ensures that anything perceivably classic rock is quickly swallowed by a menacing wall of sound but still, those quirky elements are there.
A ten-minute piece, In The Waiting Hours takes its time to fully unfurl, the opening stages once again lost in the fractal beauty of single, echoing guitar notes, augmented as the piece progresses by scything synth textures. It takes over two minutes for the riffs to arrive and, when they do, the listener finds themselves rudely ejected from the gleaming web in which the band have so patiently wound them.
The album closes with the stunning Last Light. At over fifteen minutes in length, it’s the album’s longest song and it earns its runtime by exploring the vast hinterland between the dark, post-industrial hellscape with which it opens; eerie, Swans-esque neo-folk; and large swathes of post-rock. Sometimes dark, often surprisingly beautiful, it feels like the necessary emotional cleansing in the wake of the often-brutal tracks that dominate the album and it leaves you feeling somewhat in awe at the depth and power of its arrangement.
Having consciously avoided this album for some time, I’ve now lived it for almost a week, listening, learning, and just contemplating how to describe the myriad sounds and textures that make up the album. Endlessly diverse and yet a coherent body of work, it establishes a wider, more cinematic sonic palette for the band leaving you only to wonder where they’ll take us next. Immerse yourself in An Undying Love For A Burning World, it is a truly miraculous piece of art. 10/10
