Jointhugger Stream Reaper Season EP in Full
Norwegian trio Jointhugger release their new single-song EP, Reaper Season, tomorrow, April 2, as their first offering through Majestic Mountain Records. Too substantial with its 17:55 lone titular inclusion to be merely a placeholder, it acts nonetheless as a precursor to their second full-length to come and a bridge from 2020’s I Am No One (review here) to that next LP, yet untitled. And in foreshadowing that, it might be at its most telling in terms of the stylistic growth taking place in the band’s sound.
It is guitarist/vocalist Nico Munkvold and bassist Tore Pedersen and drummer Daniel Theobald on the recording, though the latter is since out of the band — they have a replacement, also to be announced — and from its ambient-droning first minute and into the guitar-as-piano-for-emphasis-on-the-notes buildup that ensues thereafter, it culls richer proceedings than the kinda-goofy stonerliness of their moniker might lead one who didn’t hear I Am No One to believe. Sure, there’s plenty of stoner-doom riffing on display here — it bursts out from those opening minutes in viscerally tidal fashion — but even there the vocal melodies that accompany are in spirit with more complex fare.
A short, classically bluesy solo takes hold over steady roll and “Reaper Season” flows readily toward a more weighted push that itself recedes into a transitional section of noise from which the drums pick up the tempo for a surprisingly boogie-fied shuffle. The guitar and bass tones are not to be overlooked here, since essentially they’re the same — as rumbling and deeply-weighted as ever — but Jointhugger make them move. Make them dance, and that feels particularly daring on this kind of release, where the
expectation going in might be that it’s a simple onslaught of riff after riff, or maybe even just one riff played willfully ad nauseam.
As it is, Munkvold, Pedersen and Theobald stay long enough in each of Reaper Season‘s component movements to get their point across, but they’re by no means overstying their welcome, especially in that shuffle. With call and response shouts, it’s a party somehow but still thoroughly doomed, and with an abiding theme conjuring Lucifer as an embodiment of personal and expressive freedom, they would seem to have taken the message to heart in terms of blurring and transcending the lines of microgenre. I’ll take a bit of thick boogie anytime, and they wah it out to an organic-feeling conclusion as they approach the 11th minute and pull out a fuller-sounding thrust.
This too is transitional, and leading to a crash that could just a well be constructed of the two prior parts put together, thudding and lumbering but still keeping some of the airier feel of the preceding stretch, if having let go of the boogie in the process. Nothing lasts forever. They are, as it turns out, in the closing section of the song for about the last three minutes, but that stomp that finishes is affecting just the same, agonizingly slow as they tear the audio apart. Is that societal decay? The death of higher consciousness? The frickin’ plague? I don’t know, but the waves of noise that conclude Jointhugger‘s trip feel well apart from the unassuming ambience that started it. Did anyone else just hear that vulture call?
Not taking away from the forward potential Reaper Season portrays in Jointhugger‘s stylistic development, the realization of the thing itself is still what’s most striking about it. Though by no means insubstantial as a 17-plus-minute single track, it offers a depth and space that goes beyond the novel runtime and casts the band (presumably new drummer and all) as a significant presence with creative agency driving toward an identity all the more their own.
Bringer of light, you say? Works for me.
Thrilled to host the premiere of “Reaper Season” ahead of the release tomorrow. Stream it on the player below and please enjoy:
Nico Munkvold on “Reaper Season”:
Even with the coming album, Reaper Season is a stand-alone release. The track is about death, dying and Lucifer. Not necessarily literal death but maybe an ego death, death of an era, death to the concept of reckless capitalism and consumerism. We also know that most people aren’t aware that Lucifer comes from Greek Mythology and is connected with the light bringer, not wholly as ‘evil’ as was made convenient to the general religious narrative. Satan/Lucifer/The Devil acts as our inner animal or ‘beast’ as ‘they’ call it. Satan is a metaphor for the most natural part of us unhindered by what’s taught to us by society, the patriarchy and religion. Inner light, true freedom and self-reliance.
These intrinsic human traits seem to have been vilified, kept in check by a system run by fear mongers, warlords and stuffed suits on the top floor whose power is threatened by free thought and real altruism, which is why the concept of sin and moral law has been created to dumb down the populace and keep the people in herded groups to divide and conquer. The lyrics detail giving yourself over to the other side and seeing that most of what we are doing in this society is ‘wrong’ according to nature, and the Reaper is used (again) as a metaphor for the devil, Satan, the ‘dark’ side, which is actually nature, real, true freedom, not this blind ‘me, me, me’ society bullshit which sells you freedom in the form of patriarchy and consumerism. The song is written as a commentary of struggling to fit into the machine of a world and humanity that has lost its way and seems to be crumbling in front of our very eyes right now.
Preorder: https://majesticmountainrecords.bigcartel.com
Recorded and mixed by Jointhugger and Hrafn Alexander Helgason at SBC Studio with thanks to Jens Sevik.
Mastered for superlative sonic euphoria by the evil genius Haldor Grunberg at Satanic Audio.
Artwork by Spectral Ecstasy.
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