Album Review: Spaceslug, Memorial
Posted in Reviews on December 29th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
As it invariably must, Memorial begins with a dirge. The fifth album from Wrocław-based earthadelic three-piece Spaceslug, recorded over a period of four days this past Spring, arrives after 2020’s Leftovers EP (review here) and 2021’s even-more-leftover digital-single The Event Horizon (review here), which was recorded at the same time as the EP and came out as a fundraiser following a practice space flood. The Polish outfit have worked quickly across the last five-plus years of their career to establish and develop an approach of their own, and Memorial is the next logical forward creative step in that process.
At eight songs and 46 minutes, it breaks just about in half to work across two vinyl sides, and the returning trio of drummer/vocalist Kamil Ziółkowski, bassist/vocalist Jan Rutka and guitarist/backing vocalist Bartosz Janik sound not only committed to their forward progress, but recommitted, as though, having brought forth such new ideas on Leftovers and the prior 2018 LP, Eye the Tide (review here), they’re all the more clearheaded about the direction they want Memorial to take.
That leaves more room for things like emotional expression, and Memorial offers that right from “Into the Soil” that serves as the aforementioned dirge at the outset. The sense of loss is palpable and continues to work into the melodies of songs like “Follow This Land,” which follows that leadoff, and “Memorial” itself, the mirror-position starter of side B, as well as in the pointedly post-metallic psychedelia — I hope someone sends Pelagic Records a copy of this album with a friendly note — of the finale “At the Edge of Melting Point.” As to what’s being mourned, as the listener you’re left to pretty much take your pick.
The earth? Well, “At the Edge of the Melting Point” and the penultimate “Of Trees and Fire” — a highlight for its melding of psych and harsher aspects of metal; furthering the sonic accomplishments laid out through Eye the Tide at the same time it builds on the atmospherics of Leftovers — would seem to have something to say about it. The plague? Hello to “Spring of the Abyss” and “In the Hiatus Fall,” a powerful wallop of Memorial‘s longest song at 9:23 and the post-rock-into-black-metal-decay of the side-A closer. Something more personal? “Into the Soil,” “Follow This Land,” “Memorial,” and maybe even the sorrowfully hooky “Lost Undone” on side B could certainly apply — note, I haven’t seen a lyric sheet — with its Katatonia-worthy melancholy and trades between its sweeping chorus and the open, quiet stretches in its first and second halves.
Or perhaps, as with the Maciej Kamuda cover art, it’s all of these things, and Spaceslug, who began their course with 2016’s debut, Lemanis (review here), followed with Time Travel Dilemma (review here) and answered that with the Mountains and Reminiscence EP (review here) in 2018, have come to a place aesthetically where they feel comfortable making an expression and being content to have put it out there for their audience to interpret on their own. It should be noted, the ground on which they allow that interpretation to take place has far more life on it than the cover necessarily depicts, whatever losses may be being perceived by the listener or processed on the part of the band.
“Spring of the Abyss” is an obvious focal point both in its standout songcraft and for being the longest of the inclusions here, and it answers that call with an immediately tense ambience of guitar stretching for the first minute and a half before introducing the subdued, melodic vocals that are a staple of Spaceslug‘s style, mellow, echoing broadly, they’re an element that has been there since the band’s beginning but like so much else in their style has never been more able to convey emotion than they are here. Memorial is the work of a band who’ve figured out who they are pushing themselves to refine what that means.
They’ve brought together memorable hooks before, and Memorial has them too in “Follow This Land,” “Lost Undone” and even “Spring of the Abyss” to a point, but the latter is more about mood, shifting as it does after five minutes in toward throatier, meaner barks vocally and lumbering low-end tonality. The song will end with a layered solo backed by far-away drums, which feels a bit like preface for “Lost Undone,” and is something that “Of Trees and Fire” — in April 2020, Poland’s largest national park burned with what was reported as the largest wildfire in five years — answers in agonized fashion, setting forth its roll with guitar as drums, screams and bass kick in before the first minute is through, calling out into the void of grueling atmosludge and immersive tonal depth, a grey-hued psychedelic churn that gives way to a lengthy, experimentalist-feeling midsection.
The punishment, such as it is, resumes at 6:34 into the total 8:25, but along the way, Spaceslug entrance to make that resurgent impact all the more effective, and to give Memorial a due payoff such that “At the Edge of the Melting Point” — almost goth in its phrasing — is carried through like the epilogue it’s intended to be.
As to the experience of loss, one could hardly call its manifestation here anything other than timely — in the last two years, it’s been a tragically prevalent universal human thematic to such a degree that my pointing that out feels completely needless — but more to the point, it’s the manner in which Spaceslug resonate their identity in their exploration(s) of the idea that distinguish Memorial from their prior output as well as from the bulk of heavy and/or psychedelic fare surrounding. They have become only more recognizable over their time, and though the tools they’re using might be familiar — melody, tonal heft, drift, groove, and so on — the combinations and the stylistic functions they’re serving are Spaceslug‘s own.
And they’ve changed over time. It’s not unreasonable for an act to progress through however many releases they might put out in a given stretch of years, but Memorial reaffirms that progression with a fresh perspective not so much contradicting the depressive aspects of Spaceslug‘s songwriting as see the band as all the more able to convey them vibrantly. Five albums in, they may be looking back at things lost, but Spaceslug are still moving forward.
