I know, I know. There’s been a pretty fair amount said about Lumbar‘s The First and Last Days of Unwelcome around here, from the announcement to the interview, album review, and best of list, and I can’t really promise this’ll be the last of it, but a few words and then I’ll leave it alone for a while. There were plenty of other contenders for the best debut of 2013, whether it was reinvigorated veterans in Vista Chino or newcomer innovators like Beelzefuzz, but in the end, I had to go with what’s more likely than not a one-off from (left to right above) Mike Scheidt (YOB), Tad Doyle (TAD, Brothers of the Sonic Cloth), and Aaron Edge (Roareth, Iamthethorn, etc.) for two reasons: Urgency and the moment.

Urgency because of the music itself — the overlaid screams and moans that top the thunderous descending progression of “Day Two,” the lost-in-a-fog feel of “Day Four,” the weeping guitar chaos of “Day Three.” The First and Last Days of Unwelcome packed an entire discography’s worth of heavy into a 24-minute release, and even at its nadir of volume in the droning and far-off vocal tunnel of “Day Five,” was intense beyond the point of exhaustion, Edge working through the trauma of being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the best way he knew how: By recording an album. The urgency comes through in the complete immersion of an emotional state, in the turbulence that bleeds from every second of these seven songs, and in the un-concluded feel of the last, which machine-drones itself to a finish as if to indicate the utter lack of an ending to Edge‘s ongoing story.

And the moment. Yes, it’s awesome that Scheidt, Doyle and Edge came together to all work on an album, but more than that, it’s how they came together and that the result was this album. The story of Edge recording the instrumental parts while laid up in bed, in real, physical pain, is excruciating, but it’s how that is translated into the songs that gives them such power. To be able to hone that, and then bring Scheidt and Doyle into the fold and make The First and Last Days of Unwelcome complete is capturing an entirely different kind of moment; the special nature of the collaboration in concept and execution is undersold by any “supergroup” tag you might want to instill. Lumbar proved to be beyond that, a fleeting and daringly honest slice of life that didn’t want pity or sympathy or anything other than to search out some meaning in what seemed void outstretched.

To call it a “debut” implies there might be a follow-up, and it seems unlikely at this point that there will, but even so, no first outing crashed quite as hard into the consciousness in 2013 as Lumbar‘s The First and Last Days of Unwelcome, and if it’s a call that never gets its answer, there’s no doubt in my mind its echo will last a long, long time.

Now I’ll shut up about it.

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

Lumbar on Bandcamp

Lumbar on Thee Facebooks

Aaron Edge’s Hellvetika project on Bandcamp

Southern Lord Recordings

Tags: Lumbar, Lumbar The First and Last Days of Unwelcome, Oregon, Southern Lord, The First and Last Days of Unwelcome

This entry was posted on Monday, December 23rd, 2013 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.