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Lumbar, The First and Last Days of Unwelcome: The Human Laid Bare

By now, the origin of Lumbar has quickly become legend. In its complete recording form, Lumbar is instrumentalist/vocalist Aaron Edge, who’s joined by Mike Scheidt and Tad Doyle on vocals and vocals/recording, respectively. These are names of considerable consequence to have attached to a project. Between Doyle‘s pedigree in TAD and the awaited Brothers of the Sonic Cloth and Scheidt standing as one of his generation’s most innovative luminaries in doom (doominaries?) for his tenure over the last decade-plus in YOB, even before you get to rattle off the long list of projects in which Edge has taken part — Iamthethorn, Harkonen, Brothers of the Sonic Cloth, HimsaGrievous, Maple Forum alums Roareth, countless others, and even more when you factor in those to whom he’s contributed art or design work — it’s hard not to be sold beforehand on Lumbar‘s Southern Lord debut, The First and Last Days of Unwelcome. On personnel alone, it’s a landmark, but the real crux of the album isn’t in some supergroup amalgam of ego. It’s in the intensely personal nature of the material. As Edge explained in an interview here, most of The First and Last Days of Unwelcome came together during a period of immobility following his being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. 40 days in bed. No stranger to self-recording, Edge programmed the drums, fired up a Verellen Skyhammer preamp pedal and transposed 24 minutes’ worth of visceral human experience into seven varied tracks that are at times hopeful, at times oppressive and defeated, but always essentially, deeply his own. After the parts were recorded, he brought them to Scheidt, who in turn suggested they track with Doyle at his Studio Witch Ape in Washington. The First and Last Days of Unwelcome is impossible to divorce from this context, because it is the context, and knowing how it happened, the raw circumstance of how it was made, the freshness of the wounds driving it, brings a level of admiration to the project with which even its lineup can’t hope to compete.

I won’t feign impartiality. Between having helped Roareth put out their first and only record through this site’s in-house label — it was the first release, actually, and my conversations with Edge are good memories that were pivotal in making it happen — and having been in touch over the years with Scheidt as well as being a fan of his and Doyle‘s work, there’s just no way I can pretend to approach Lumbar from neutral ground. Generally, I look at that as a drawback, but in the case of The First and Last Days of Unwelcome and how personal the nature of the album is, I think it actually helps. For years and years, Edge has bounced from one project to the next — even as I type this he’s looking for a band to sing for in Portland — but aside from being arguably the highest-profile, Lumbar might also be the most his own of everything he’s done. The expression in these songs, whether it’s the desperate cloying that begins centerpiece “Day Four” or the explosion of rage that emerges from it, is his. And the claustrophobia of “Day Five,” in which the world seems to be happening somewhere outside the echo chamber of the song itself, isn’t impartial. There’s no distance to Lumbar whatsoever, no moment where the artist responsible has stepped back and said, “I’m going to write about this experience.” That’s not what The First and Last Days of Unwelcome is. Instead, each of these pieces is a transcription of a moment or a stretch of this time. Some, like “Day One,” “Day Two” (the tracklisting corresponding with the days) and “Day Six,” are transposed as relatively complete song ideas — the vocal and instrumental arrangements satisfy as finished products — but not everything is designed to be so neat. The drumless “Day Three” works around a frantic guitar-as-fiddle progression that seethes with tension waiting to boil over as a low rumble rises beneath, Edge shouting, “Why are you here?” from within the morass. He’s low in the mix, overwhelmed at first, and comes forward only as the song itself works to an end of echoing heartbeats and droning, and the aforementioned “Day Five” is a postcard from some unspoken level of hell that conveys its agonies and is gone. No verses or choruses; atmospheres and impressions. Front to back, it is a brief — again, just 24 minutes — but haunting listen.

And even the more “straightforward” material, those songs that present a more completed picture, are informed by the atmospheres of the other parts. One day bleeds into next, as it were — although the tracks aren’t intended necessarily to portray a single 24 hours so much as a vague overarching stretch. Scheidt makes his presence felt almost immediately after the sample that opens “Day One” with a semi-clean lead vocal over a backing track and rolling riff that Edge could just as easily have conjured working from a YOB influence. The second half kicks in and drops out around standalone (or stand-with-drums, anyway) guitar cycles, layers of screaming breaking down to manic repetitions of the word “No” over feedback and rumble. “Day Two” is more of a mash vocally, but “Day Four,” when it hits its launch point, brings Scheidt forward at full growl, and he adds a cleaner approach to “Day Six” as well. Edge and Doyle added their voices as well, so apart perhaps from “Day Six,” it’s not as if Lumbar is exclusively fronted by one artist over the others, and particularly in the concluding dirge march of “Day Seven,” The First and Last Days of Unwelcome benefits from all of its contributors in establishing maybe not a hopeful feel, but at least one that gives the impression that the story doesn’t conclude with the last drum hit or final drone. In terms of mood, it’s nowhere near the kind of there’s-no-way-out snare that “Day Two” through “Day Five” — all of which clock in between two and three minutes long — are able to elicit as one feeds into the next, but I wouldn’t say Lumbar are offering a saccharine positive ending either. Rather, like the album on the whole, “Day Seven” leaves the feeling that it’s just a fraction of the whole story, just a piece, really, of Edge‘s experience, both with MS and as a songwriter. It not a tidy finish, but it’s not a tidy album and it’s not meant to convey a tidy idea. It’s the stuff of life — a sometimes cruel, sometimes brutal melee of emotion — and both for the fact that it translates these emotions coherently and the fact that it offers no distance without drowning in the tide it creates, what’s likely to be Lumbar‘s only outing proves a listening experience as powerful and necessary as the drive that crafted it. Recommended.

Lumbar, The First and Last Days of Unwelcome (2013)

Lumbar on Thee Facebooks

Southern Lord Recordings

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