Sleestak, The Fall of Altrusia: Woe Be the Architect of Our City
More than anything I’ve listened to in a long while, The Fall of Altrusia — the second self-released album from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, doom explorers Sleestak – demands to be taken as a whole. Although the Land of the Lost references of the double-guitar, bass and drums four-piece are easily enough traced, their music is actually far more complex, never quite delving completely into meandering psychedelia, but adding a darkened jam feel to at times surprisingly metallic doom. The Fall of Altrusia is broken into chapters in the tracklisting, and though there’s an element of indulgence in that and in the music likewise, it’s justified by the songs themselves. Sleestak blend genres, fuse wavy guitar sounds and noisy drones, contrast deep growls with Wovenhand-style musing, and most of all, craft a coherent musical narrative from these seemingly disparate and usually isolated elements. It might take a few listens to fully appreciate, but The Fall of Altrusia is propelled by an intense and self-aware creativity – that is, Sleestak know the genres they’re toying with and clearly didn’t just happen upon their sound, but though the material is dense at times, it’s also refreshingly individual.
As the appropriately-titled “Chapter 1 – In the Beginning” starts to lay out the narrative, and guitarist/vocalist/organist Matt Schmitz follows an ambient intro and heavy-riff-into-Opethian-pretty-part tradeoff to deliver the first lines of the album as “War, fear, evolution/Civilization, technology/Manipulation breeds anarchy,” I feel more like I’m listening to Fear Factory than anything that would fall under the doom heading, despite the somewhat languid pace. Drummer Marcus Bartell adds to the metallic atmosphere with pulsing double-kick bass drumming later in the song, betraying a bit of Godflesh-style extremity while bassist Dan Bell and guitarist Brian Gresser relish in thick tones soon to be relinquished again as the lighter pre-vocal movement returns to set up the apex and conclusion. “Chapter 1 – In the Beginning” is ably done, but what’s even more notable about it is how well it flows into “Chapter 2 – Exiled From the City.” I don’t know if Sleestak wrote The Fall of Altrusia as one long piece or as separate songs they then wove together, but the flow between cuts is one of the strongest facets of the album. “Chapter 2 – Exiled From the City” finds Schmitz employing some David Eugene Edwards-style clean vocals over organ and tense strumming guitars, and an extended semi-jam on which Bartell’s ride cymbal seems to cut through everything else in the mix.
That’s all the more a shame for the subtle charm Bell puts into his bassline, but what really stands out about the drumming on “Chapter 2 – Exiled From the City,” and on The Fall of Altrusia as a whole, is how processed the drums sound. It’s not so much what Bartell is playing as it is the production thereof. The snare sounds too uniform and mechanized, too bright and forward for the soft pull of the latter part of that track, so that it undoes the melodic work of Schmitz’s organ, which is doubly unfortunate for how it disrupts the aforementioned flow Sleestak have clearly worked so hard to establish across the seven tracks, and which for the most part is impeccably maintained, even as the plodding, thickly-riffed doom groove of “Chapter 3 – The Prophecy of the Great Sleep” takes hold. One of two prophecies Sleestak have in store for The Fall of Altrusia, this one finds Schmitz once again utilizing his growl over one of the record’s best riffs that marches along until 3:19 in, when the song changes to a more rocking progression that carries it into another slowdown finale, setting up “Chapter 4 – Regression within the Hive” and its more outwardly progressive feel.
Like the warble on Schmitz’s clean vocals on “Chapter 2 – Exiled From the City,” the effects on the guitars of “Chapter 4 – Regression within the Hive” feel dialed in digitally, either through the recording software used or the band’s (doubtless considerable) pedal boards. Nonetheless, it’s not the guitar sounds I’m thinking about when Schmitz layers in simultaneous high and low screams for what’s unquestionably the heaviest movement in the whole of The Fall of Altrusia. Where “Chapter 1 – In the Beginning” seemed to be pulling its doom influence more from the early work of the European scene – thinking Paradise Lost, in particular – “Chapter 4 – Regression within the Hive” rivals Swallow the Sun’s delivery, and Sleestak’s penchant for structure shows itself as the song leads into “Chapter 5 – Disturbance of the Coccoon,” a softer excursion mirroring the contrast the foursome affected earlier between the album’s first two tracks, even going so far as to include a long instrumental stretch – which, again, is where Bell shines – at the end. Another seamless transition and the 17-minute “Chapter 6 – The Marshall Prophecy” commences with a well-earned sense of foreboding.
You could call the second of The Fall of Altrusia’s two prophecies a microcosm of the album in everything but the fact that it’s instrumental. It starts slow and melodic and morphs into more doomly metal before shifting into proggy space rock thanks to guest synth work from Adam Bartell, all within the first four minutes of its runtime. From there, Sleestak’s longest jam ensues, and that carries “Chapter 6 – The Marshall Prophecy” through its next five-plus minutes, with some of Gresser and Schmitz’s most distinguishable interplay, but eventually the guitars, bass and drums slowly fade out, and what’s left is a wall of drone for the remainder of the song – some six minutes. Given the flurry of activity preceding and the fact that there’s still one more song to go, it does seem like a strange choice, but if one considers the closing “Chapter 7 – Pakuni Shaman Chant of the Altrusian Moth” as more of an epilogue — which one could argue it is, musically — than another installment of the narrative, it makes more sense. Thus, when the droning itself fades to silence, and the soft guitar lines of the seventh cut kick in, it’s not just afterthought, but neither is it really part of The Fall of Altrusia proper. Quiet notes are topped by the titular chants (again, evoking Wovenhand) and backed by a tambourine that shakes in the very last seconds of the song’s 3:48, as if to signify the spell has ended.
Sleestak’s The Fall of Altrusia is unbridled in its ambitiousness and huge in its scope, and enough admirable for those things alone before adding the actual performances by Schmitz, Gresser, Bell and Bartell to the mix. I’d be interested to hear them work on their arrangements more, see how the atmospheres in some of these movements could be fleshed out through the use of instrumentation outside the rock norm, or how the jammed spontaneity of “Chapter 2 – Exiled From the City” and “Chapter 5 – Disturbance of the Coccoon” could be integrated into the rest of the songwriting (if it could at all), but no doubt The Fall of Altrusia is a fascinating and distinctive work, however the production might be holding it back in terms of the drum sounds and the sonic space it occupies. For my first listening experience with Sleestak, The Fall of Altrusia displays remarkable potential for the band to leave a mark on the style of progressive and metallic doom.
Tags: Milwaukee, Sleestak, Unsigned bands, Wisconsin
Saw these guys at Days Of The Doomed. They started their set by saying “We’re Sleestak, and this is our last song”