On the back of the self-released debut from San Francisco post-doomers Nero Order, there’s written the following: “There is sustenance and there is death. Beyond this, nothing is for everyone. Do not mistake familiarity for cohesion. He who draws a line does not necessarily do so for want of the ability to create a circle. There is the wheel and there is the road. This is our will.” It’s a far cry from Type O Negative’s “Don’t mistake lack of talent for genius” from the back of Bloody Kisses, but apparently, Nero Order, whose four-track/54-minute full-length is called The Tower, have a lot to say. Indeed, the four-piece, which formed in 2006, is virtually clawing at “the epic” from the get-go. From that on the back of the digipak to “All of nature is restored by fire,” quoted inside, to the fact that the shortest song on The Tower, “Celebration of a Wounding,” checks in at nine minutes and the longest is nearly twice that, Nero Order’s ambition seems limited only by how much a disc and a listener’s attention will hold. Joined by Oxbow and literature’s own Eugene S. Robinson for third cut, “Every Pillar and its Crumbling,” the band seems all the more geared toward the grand.

That has its ups and downs, like everything. Anyone who’s ever heard Napalm Death knows a 30-second song can be an epic and that mere track length doesn’t determine anything more than a band’s ability to interconnect and/or repeat parts. The Tower at times has that part-collection feel to some of its songs, and somewhat ironically, it’s “Celebration of a Wounding,” which follows opener “Signs of Five” (11:21), that affects the most cohesive build. While much of the other material follows the post-hardcore/post-metal (whatever genre you want to stick these guys in, they’re post-it) ethic of intellectualism in approach, it seems to do so at the expense of a structure. That’s not to say guitarist Harper doesn’t have an idea the path the tracks are taking – it’s not like Nero Order are just jamming out – but it’s hard to write a song that’s 11 minutes long and that still feels like a song. The Tower drifts into and out of fast and slow tempos, and vocalist Lindo adapts his voice from woeful shouting to semi-melodic clean singing accordingly, and though the vocals are well mixed, they sound dry and like they’d benefit from some reverb, to help accentuate the sonic space Nero Order are creating musically. The rhythm section of Hoyt on bass and Butler on drums has its work cut out for it in keeping up with the changes, but one expects if “slapping it together and rolling with it” was Nero Order’s thing to start with, The Tower would be a much different record.

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