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Review & Full Album Stream: New Light Choir, Torchlight

new light choir torchlight

[Click play above to stream New Light Choir’s Torchlight in full. Album is out this Friday, Nov. 23, on Svart Records.]

Near the end of organ-laced second track “Queen of Winter” there is a lyrical turn. The driving 4:34 piece arrives following opener “Grand Architect” on the New Light Choir‘s Svart-delivered third album, Torchlight, and is the final chapter in a quick initial salvo before the six-minute “Firebird” takes hold as the longest cut included. It happens in the last stretch of the song. The line, “Before the winter begins,” is being repeated following a suitable tempest of riffs and rhythm, as the Raleigh, North Carolina, self-recording, studio-only two-piece of guitarist/vocalist John Niffenegger and drummer Chris Dalton seem to reinvent progressive, blackened and traditional metals in their own image, and at 4:15, the lyric changes for the last go. Instead of, “Before the winter begins,” it’s, “Before her winter begins,” and on paper that’s not a huge shift, but its nonetheless emblematic of the level of detail and precision put into Torchlight as a whole.

Right down to one word in one of 10 songs for one line on a 45-minute album, every moment of Torchlight feels like it’s doing exactly what New Light Choir has intended it to do. The narrative around the album is one of stylistic reach, and indeed, there’s plenty of it, but across the tumult of “Omens” and the what-if-Rush-had-invented-black-metal “Psalm 6,” all frenetic drumming and poised vocal melody and blindingly progressive figures and structures, but it’s not just about taking two or three or four different styles and smashing them together. There are bands who do that and make it work to varying degrees of success, but rather than highlight the divisions between the various elements at play — and it is very much play — across Torchlight, New Light Choir work to erase the boundaries of genre in the first place. It’s as if their goal was to sit down and construct a record where every individual moment was geared toward rendering “File Under” moot.

New Light Choir made their debut with a self-titled LP in 2010, and songs from it carried almost a Wovenhand-style sense of space (thinking of “Choral” near the middle of the tracklist), but as they followed that with Volume II in 2014 — High Roller Records released it in 2015 — and found themselves working more in a classic production-style with an overarching theme, the creative development was palpable. The same is true in sitting that second outing next to Torchlight, as “Adamantine” seems to have found the blend of fullness and rawness in the recording itself that the first two full-lengths seemed to be driving toward, and their lyrics about an unbreakable metal there could hardly be more appropriate. While I don’t know what the circumstances of the recording were, the band worked on Torchlight across three years from later-2015 through February of this year, and while that could’ve just been a matter of their not having time to get into Studio 775 for anything other than laying down snippets at a time, as Niffenegger intones the line “Heavy metal in my veins” shortly before the acoustic guitar and choral keys lead the way out and into the thrashier start of the aforementioned “Psalm 6,” the material indeed sounds like it’s been lived with.

new light choir

It’s thought through, but not staid. From “Grand Architect” onward, Dalton‘s drums are a catalyst for the melded aesthetics, whether it’s in that leadoff as they bring classic doom and thrash into heady coexistence, or on “Golden Ring,” as the graceful lyric “And so it goes” is met with a corresponding instrumental turn on the way to its last verse. Atmosphere is no less central throughout, but on a sheer performance level, Torchlight is a triumph in its uncompromised look at what metal can do and can be. If it took an actual three years of work from top to bottom to make it, I could hardly be surprised listening to the balance of lead and rhythm guitar layers in “Omens” earlier on or the running toms that start and crash into the beginning of the penultimate “Last March,” which nearly blasts through its earlier moments before reimagining Primordial-style post-black metal with that ever-present touch of prog in the vocals but a locked in half-time megagroove after its midpoint that seems to make the journey on that march all the more worthwhile.

Before that, they delve into a rousing cascade on the three-minute “Moondawn Mirage III,” which eschews lyrics until turning to acoustics in its final movement and is the shortest track on the album but still well more substantial than an interlude, and after, they bring forth the finale, “Stardust and Torchlight,” which feels less like a summary than a culmination. With a steady gallop in its initial verse and chorus, it’s black metal but for the vocals, and even after a momentary slowdown just past the halfway mark, the turn into a mid-paced progression and a winding, plotted lead feels smooth and as natural as any of the many other headspinning changes that have preceded it. As they do with “Moondawn Mirage III” and “Adamantine,” they finish “Stardust and Torchlight” with a move into acoustic guitar, residual feedback holding out beneath a few quick plucks and a final strum that once again serves a reminder of just how purposeful Torchlight is in its directed nuance.

Different listeners will hear various references in the songs, but ultimately New Light Choir‘s style belongs to no one so much as to the duo itself, and the manner in which they’re able to make it own is as much a reshaping of metal as it is an homage to it. I’m not sure if it’s fair to call them experimental, if only for the connotation of well-let’s-try-this-and-see-what-happens that seems to bring, where Dalton and Niffenegger execute their work in a not-makeshift way, but very much befitting their status as a studio project. That’s not to say the tracks on Torchlight wouldn’t work live if a full lineup came together around the two founders, just that that’s what it would take for the material as it is to be brought to life on a stage. Whether that happens or not — it’s been eight years since their debut and it hasn’t yet, so I’ll hazard a guess that it’s not top priority — the clarity of their vision is one of their greatest assets throughout Torchlight, and if that’s the thread that carries them through the next several years of work on their next round of material, it can only be a win.

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