Review & Full Album Premiere: Black Space Riders, We Have Been Here Before
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on October 18th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
[Click play above to stream Black Space Riders’ We Have Been Here Before in its entirety. Album is out Oct. 21 on Cargo Records.]
It’s hard to know whether the seventh full-length from Münster, Germany, progressive heavy rockers Black Space Riders, titled We Have Been Here Before, is intended as reassurance or warning. The cover says the latter, title-track has lyrics about mind control and breaking out and across the 15-song/81-minute mega-offering, the five-piece band run a sonic gamut quickly from hard-grooving riffs like that of the post-intro leadoff, punk-via-Killing–Joke “Crawling (DownWithEverything)” to the heavier shove of “Trapped in an Endless Loop” and on into the consciously-dreaming “Almost the Lost.” But you never quite know. Setting forth with a minute of ambience they call “Crawling In,” the long-running, always-recognizable-but-never-put-out-the-same-record-twice five-piece comprised of vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist JE, vocalist/keyboardist/percussionist SEB, guitarist SLI, bassist/backing vocalist MEI and drummer CRIP (also digeridoo), present a massive, willfully unmanageable collection of varied song ideas, bending and in the case of the smart-crunch-int0-New-Wave-and-space-rock “AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGH” outright breaking the rules of genre as though to shake their audience out of expectation’s limits.
Rest assured, Black Space Riders know what they’re doing. They’ve obviously been busy since putting out Amoretum Vol. 2 (review here) and Amoretum Vol. 1 (review here) in 2018, at least on the writing end. We Have Been Here Before pulls back on some of the electronic elements the band have used in the past, at least on average, but experiments like the merging of dub and Neue Deutsche Härte riffing in “In Dust,” or even the lead guitar shimmer that accompanies the festival-stage-ready forward thrust of “Shine” assure there’s no lack of breadth, and the swaps between JE and SEB on lead vocals with MEI backing — a band might produce a lyric sheet that looks this dense and still not use their actual names — add to the overarching complexity of their arrangements and intentions. And We Have Been Here Before, recorded/mixed by Peter Lagoda with a hand in production from JE and the band as a whole (Philipp Welsing mastered), emphasizes the wide swath of ground, aesthetically speaking, that Black Space Riders call their own. Since their 2010 self-titled debut (review here), they have thwarted easy categorization, and as the consuming “Beautiful” and the proggy-shuffling-until-it-hits-a-wall-o’-riff “Fear No More” round out the first of the two LPs, giving over to “In Dust” as though to inform the listener of having entered the next stage of the expressive statement being made, they are nothing if not consistent in that regard.
The four years since the Amoretum duology make for the longest break Black Space Riders have had between full-lengths, even with the ultimate caveat of extenuating circumstances. I do not know when We Have Been Here Before was recorded or how the songs were built in the studio, but perhaps another interpretation of the title is the band acknowledging a push on their own part to engage with earlier methods. They do not repeat themselves, as even the careening heft of “Trapped in an Endless Loop” or the subdued, synth-laced “This Flow” or “AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGH” demonstrate on their own, never mind in the context of what surrounds them, but the manner in which “Fear No More” hits into its hook tells you that the chorus is the point, and even adopting such a methodology in that way comes across as a means to go to ground in terms of style. That said, the ground Black Space Riders “go to” is never quite actually-simple. Even when they seem to rally around a riff, a movement, or the sweeping multi-singer chorus of “Leaving the Hill,” there’s a richness to their layering and an attention to detail — the muted mutes, the balance of post-rock lead lines and the waves of distortion beneath — that speaks to the thoughtfulness of their approach, whatever piece or part of a song they’re executing at that moment.
Have they been here before? Have we? As the Bowie-esque “A Whisper” leads into its two longest tracks in the closing salvo of “Queen of Light” (8:55) and “Worlds Collide Dans Ma Tête” (10:48), they seem singularly conscious of having arrived at side D, which gets its own extended intro before the first volume surge of “Queen of Light” unveils the back and forth that comprises the first half of the song before the second absconds in tempo and breadth, a progressive rocker that’s actually both. And it’s a fitting encapsulation of We Have Been Here Before that the next, last song, does something completely different, beginning with a slow burn of (purposefully) noodling guitar that moves into an elephantine march, receding and swelling again to finish out, drums holding together with structure what might otherwise come apart at around eight minutes in when things get even spacier. But a giant riff is as suitable a way to go out as anything I can think of, and certainly one would not expect Black Space Riders to attempt some summary of what the record prior has had on offer; would be neither in-character for the band nor likely to be successful given the scope of the material.
But this too speaks to something consistent about Black Space Riders over the course of their tenure — they have always been a challenging band. They’re a challenging band to write about, and I have to think they’d take that as the compliment it’s intended to be. But the challenge is also what makes them fascinating. There are pieces, elements, aspects, parts of songs that you can put a pin on and say, “that sounds like this” — and I do that a couple times above, as you’ve hopefully already seen — but the truth is these slivers feed into a whole impression that, in the case of We Have Been Here Before, is familiar and also not in the context of the band’s prior work, not so much a refresh or a continuation or a reboot as an exploration of the creative process through which Black Space Riders make their particular, hyper-specific kind of rock and roll. Their work has always warranted and demanded multiple, consciously-engaged listens to be best appreciated — to be listened to as well as heard — and indeed, We Have Been Here Before is nothing new in that regard, but as a collection it nonetheless finds the band well at home even on unfamiliar terrain.
Black Space Riders, “Trapped in an Endless Loop” official video
Black Space Riders on Instagram
