Album Review: Here Lies Man, Ritual Divination
Posted in Reviews on January 5th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Ritual Divination is billed as the fourth full-length from Los Angeles outfit Here Lies Man. The release it follows is 2019’s No Ground to Walk Upon (review here), which at 26 minutes was shorter than either of their first two albums — 2017’s self-titled debut (review here) and 2018’s You Will Know Nothing (review here) — and at the time billed as an EP. This is bookkeeping, but Ritual Divination is the fourth Here Lies Man album and not the third, it only brings into emphasis the dilemma facing the band at this stage in their development. That is, for founding guitarist/vocalist Marcos Garcia (aka Chico Mann) and drummer Geoff Mann, as well as bassist JP Maramba and keyboardist Doug Organ, the central innovation of their work has always been conceptual. Here Lies Man‘s project began with the intention of bringing together classic-style heavy rock and proto-metallic riffs and tones with Afrobeat-derived rhythms and percussion. It has worked and continues to work well for them, but Ritual Divination brings them face-first up against the question of what comes next? When you’ve started out from such an individualized point, what can you do to maintain not just your own interest, but that of your listenership as well?
My understanding, limited at the best of times, is that the vinyl edition of Ritual Divination leaves off the tracks “Can’t Kill It,” “Run Away Children,” “I Wander,” “You Would Not See From Heaven” (a highlight) and “Cutting Through the Tether,” all of which are listed on the digital version, the latter closing. Okay. Entirely possible that the band or RidingEasy Records, which has put out everything they’ve done to-date, didn’t want to do a 2LP pressing the first time out. But as it stands, the ‘complete’ Ritual Divination runs 15 songs and 60 minutes long, more than doubling No Ground to Walk Upon and easily surpassing the first two records as well. Glut of inspiration? Certainly possible, and if so, good for them. But it also goes to answer the question above of what a band can do when their central innovation has already been accomplished. In the case of Here Lies Man, their restless snare, post-Black Sabbath riffs, clavinet and psychedelic undertones sound like a signature in songs like “Collector of Vanities” and “Underland,” even as they work in new and more complex ideas. So that’s what you do. You refine what you’ve done before.
You bring new textures to an insistent groove like “Night Comes.” You open the record with its trip-doomiest inclusion “In These Dreams,” which flows into the landmark that is “I Told You (You Shall Die),” the two of them making for an immersion effect clearly intentional on the part of the band since they’re the two longest songs on the vinyl — on the download, “Cutting Through the Tether” bookends at 5:26; I’m not sure how many songs are actually on the CD but of course the full hour would fit — and you shift from there into a series of flowing nods, from the relative brevity of the 2:29 “Underland” into the national acrobatics of “What You See” and the shuffle and swirl that arrives in “Can’t Kill It,” a deceptive fullness of wash playing out above all that movement of rhythm. As one would expect from Here Lies Man, most of their songs are in the three-to-four-minute range, but individual tracks stand out on Ritual Divination in ways they haven’t before, whether it’s the crunch of guitar in “Run Away Children” or the boogie-mastery of “I Wander,” and even amid a collection that resides on the other side of what one commonly things of unmanageable in terms of runtime, pieces find a way to distinguish themselves.
And taken as a whole, that’s what Ritual Divination does as well — it finds a way to stand out. It doesn’t throw out the accomplishments Here Lies Man have made over the last several years as they’ve dug into their niche of heavy rock. It digs deeper. It is the tightest assemblage they’ve had in terms of structure, and yet the songs still feel spacious and even when hurried in tempo, hurried with a purpose rather than feeling haphazard in construction or underexplored in terms of craft. Ritual Divination isn’t deceptive in its atmosphere — it’s all right there for you to hear, and they make it as plain as they can for the audience by putting the two longer songs at the fore — but the band’s concept has always been somewhat heady and it remains so. How versed in Afrobeat is the average listener of heavy rock and roll? I haven’t taken a survey to find out, and maybe at this point it doesn’t matter, since (apparently) four records deep into their tenure, it’s entirely possible to put on centerpiece “Night Comes” or the subsequent side B run of “Come Inside,” “Collector of Vanities,” “Disappointed” and “You Would Not See From Heaven” and just go where Here Lies Man take you.
Certainly the band have earned that trust at this point, and ultimately, if one looks at Ritual Divination in context of their overarching progression, the shifts it represents in approach — notably, they recorded as a four-piece for the first time — and the tweaks to their sound and style aren’t all that different from how another group might grow naturally and explore new ideas from album to album. It’s just the starting point that’s different, and so as Here Lies Man dig deeper into that claim they’ve staked in terms of aesthetic, they’re all the more identifiable for the work they’ve put in. But throw all that out for a second and what you end up with on Ritual Divination is still arguably the band’s strongest collection of tracks, and by the time you get down to “The Fates Have Won” and “Out Goes the Night” ahead of the drifting-away-but-still-snare-anchored “Cutting Through the Tether,” that’s what’s going to matter more. Ritual Divination does not reinvent what doesn’t need reinventing. It demonstrates the longer arc of creative development and direction one hopes the band will continue to take. They remain unto themselves in sound and style.
