Posted in Bootleg Theater on November 11th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
Though it’s fair to call The Otolith‘s debut album, Folium Limina (review here), urgent on any number of levels as regards emotional resonance or sonic push, the surge at the beginning of second track “Andromeda’s Wing” is about as immediate as they get. And it’s pretty immediate, so there you go. That moment, especially coming out of album opener “Sing No Coda,” is crucial to the early impression the album makes, a claim to intensity present and, hopefully, future, that also maintains the atmosphere of the track before as it begins to unfold its melody from there. It is, in other words, one hell of a 30 seconds or so of music, and the nine minutes that follow are nothing to shake a stick at either.
Soar and crush, both readily on display across the record, are at the core of “Andromeda’s Wing,” but in one of the band’s most fortunate inheritances from members’ prior outfit SubRosa, their vision of post-metal is deftly arranged such that what essentially breaks down on paper to trades between loud parts and quiet parts are a richer experience than just the simple back and forth. And no, that’s not just an effect of the violins or the largesse of tone they captured in the studio. It’s in how everything comes together through the guitar, bass, synth, drums, vocals, and strings; a wholly consuming effect that can feel like a wash, totally overwhelming, or can be a world in which to dwell, depending entirely on the moment, the listener, and the course of the song in question.
Like much of Folium Limina, “Andromeda’s Wing” is complex and engrossing, severe and melodic, a beauty-in-darkness kind of pummel and spread that is emblematic of the individualized creative spirit that makes the album so substantial. I haven’t decided yet if it counts as a debut, really, since it’s more like a lineup and name change than a new band being formed, but if it is, it’s the best one of 2022. Maybe that’s a thing worth celebrating anyway in the spirit of hope that they do more sometime in the next couple years. Or, you know, ever. I’d be satisfied with ever.
Enjoy the clip:
The Otolith, “Andromeda’s Wing” official video
Salt Lake City’s symphonic doom and post-metal unit THE OTOLITH (with members of SubRosa) share their brand new “Andromeda’s Wing” video today. Their debut album “Folium Limina” is out now on Blues Funeral Recordings.
About the video, the band says: “We wrote this song in Levi’s [Hanna, guitar] basement during the winter, huddled in a circle of chairs next to his computer and his pinball machine. It came together over a couple of weeks, and at one point, Kim [Cordray, violin/vocals] had a beautiful idea for an outro vocal melody and some lyrics. Then I connected her idea with these recurring dreams I have about aliens. After that the lyrics sort of tumbled out. The protagonist is sleepwalking in the deep countryside, passing by nocturnal animals who watch as she journeys. She has the feeling of leaving her body and looking down at herself in the road. She comes to a natural spring and speaks with alien visitors about what can be done to slow the destruction of the planet.”
THE OTOLITH is the avant-garde doom and post-metal band formed by former SubRosa members Kim Cordray, Levi Hanna, Andy Patterson and Sarah Pendleton, alongside bassist Matt Brotherton. Following the same muse of cathartic and cataclysmic melancholy as their previous outfit, their debut album “Folium Limina” draws no line between beauty and doom, with ghostly symphonic strings interlacing with crushing bass, guitar and percussion, while all four vocalists conduct signals across time and space to arrive through cosmic storms to a sea of liquid stars. A cathartic and mind-elevating experience without a doubt!
THE OTOLITH is Kim Cordray – Violin, Vocals Levi Hanna – Guitar, Vocals Andy Patterson – Drums, Percussion Matt Brotherton – Bass Guitar, Vocals Sarah Pendleton – Violin, Lead Vocals
Posted in Reviews on October 28th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
There’s just so much happening. It’s like life. From the tolling bell, crow calls and subtle bass-led progression — almost dance — soon joined by a tense chugging guitar line, peppered ambient notes of who knows what, and emergent violin in the first two minutes of “Sing No Coda” to the ultra-melancholic wash in the end of closer “Dispirit,” with its weaving lines of rhythmic static, sad, slow strings, and noise on an eventual fade, yes, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. The first lines of the Folium Limina arrive with Utah-ready puritanical severity behind them, vocalists Sarah Pendleton and Kim Cordray, both of whom also play violin, finding their way into and around harmony while they, guitarist/vocalist Levi Hanna, bassist/vocalist Matt Brotherton and drummer/percussionist Andy Patterson — who engineered, mixed and mastered the recording, as he will — begin to unfurl the bleak majesty that is the backdrop before which their debut album takes place.
The this-is-mostly-slow-but-all-urgent sensibility that persists throughout the six pieces/63 minutes and the outright elephantine tonal heft of their heaviest chapters, as well as basic elements like the vocal harmonies, violins, immersive post-metallic claustrophobia, longer-form songwriting, etc., are The Otolith‘s chief inheritances from SubRosa, and if the argument being made in Folium Limina is that the prior band had more to say — that they weren’t done when they were done — it’s one that prompts easy agreement with the songs making that point.
Pendleton (also of Asphodel Wine) steps into a lead vocalist role and Hanna swaps bass for guitar in the new outfit, and he and/or Brotherton are perhaps more prominent as male/harsh vocalists (pardon me if I don’t break out percentages) as demonstrated at the and-go!-surging-lurch beginning of “Andromeda’s Wing” and the sweeping midsection of the aforementioned “Dispirit,” which at 11:08 bookends Folium Limina with “Sing No Coda” (which opens with its longest track, thereby earning ever-coveted ‘immediate points,’ at 13:29; everything else is between nine and 10 minutes), but aesthetically, there’s little question that The Otolith are moving outward from what SubRosa became across their four full-lengths, even as they begin to lay claim to a path of their own apart from the songwriting contributions of Rebecca Vernon (now of The Keening), whose departure from SubRosa effectively ended the band, and fair enough.
Narrative, blessings and peace upon it, has its contextual role to play, but knowing SubRosa‘s work is not a barrier to engaging The Otolith in the slightest. That is, it’s not too late before you’ve begun to listen. Their songwriting happens in waves, with “Sing No Coda” establishing the movement-based methodology that persists through much of the outing and seems to bring each individual part to a certain place of ceremony, whether it’s the winding and pushing of “Andromeda’s Wing” or the offsetting of massive plod in the highlight-among-highlights “Ekpyrotic” (if you’re looking for a “Stones From the Sky” moment; it’s there), which seems to howl into an abyss of American expanse: “Great birds once human gather to drink in the high desert night” setting the stage for the culminating lyric “We are the light,” which even the growls in Latin that follow somehow don’t outdo for heft, general aural gorgeousness or listener consumption. It is the sound of porcelain created with care, crushed to powder, and remade, over and over.
The Latin phrase at the end of “Ekpyrotic,” ‘amor vincit omnia,’ translates as ‘love conquers all’ (‘truth’ is similarly exalted earlier in the track; again, fair enough) and that seems to be the core message of the album in general — unless you count the creativity of the snare in “Andromeda’s Wing” and the toms in “Dispirit” as their own kind of message in their signifying the attention paid to every note and measure of this work; the layer of whispers in the short break in “Hubris” before the next wave of volume brings the hook in its own time, and countless other examples of critical minutiae that help give Folium Limina such impossible but inevitable depth — but it serves especially well as a lead-in for “Hubris,” “Bone Dust” and “Dispirit,” which follow on the second half of the tracklist and play through a legible storyline of perseverance in the face of “hubris like smoke in your mane” and the reminder that, “Each of us holds a seed of power/That cannot be thieved.”
“Bone Dust” places this more directly in the context of preserving the US experiment as a multicultural democratic nation — mixed results, to-date, to say the least — against encroaching authoritarianism, both through its own battle cries amid the full-breadth tones that awaken from the subdued opening stretch of violin and soft bass and guitar, and through the soliloquy sampled from Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film, The Great Dictator, in which a leader clearly intended to be a nazi casts off repressing the populace in favor of encouraging freedom and democracy. It is strikingly, tragically relevant, presented over a chugging, purposefully repetitive riff and crash intended to give it space. Chaplin urges, “do not despair” since so long as men die, freedom will never perish, and pledges to fight for a new, better, more just world.
It’s hard to know if it’s wishful thinking or mourning for the fact that our reality bears so little resemblance to that one, but “Disprit” gets final say. Made tense through ambience and strings initially, it conveys the exhaustion of good souls being steamrolled as it builds toward its eventual payoff — that tom part; yes — and hits into full volume at the 4:30 mark, though that burst is by no means as far as The Otolith are willing to push it. One more time before Folium Limina is done, the five-piece offer years’ worth of depth and hear-something-new fodder as textures of violin, the driving shove of the guitar, bass, drums, shouted vocals, whatever else is happening there in those troubled reaches, all coalesce around the singular idea of loss of cause through dismay, a kind of nod from within to the apocalypse-fatigue that may well cost the United States its political system — and to the detriment of everybody, there’s no fully-automated luxury gay space communism this time; it’s christian nationalism and radical capitalist exploitation for all; sure hope nobody beats your kid to death for being trans, but if they do, hey, thoughts and prayers, right? all part of white American god’s plan, like mass shootings! — raging for the next three minutes before subsiding into a humming drone, piano and violin, with the already-noted static and noise behind, outlasting like some vague notion of justice and rightness the existence of which, sadly, isn’t enough to make it real. This is a hard, mean, world. Among its few saving graces: records like this one that go through it with you.
The story of the album is unavoidably the shift from SubRosa to The Otolith, and it may be another record or two — touring, obviously, if that’s a thing that might happen — before The Otolith are more distinguished from the majority of its members’ prior group, but clearly part of what’s being accomplished here is to continue that creative growth as a unit and the aesthetic statement that made SubRosa‘s swansong, 2016’s For This We Fought the Battle of Ages (review here), a landmark for them as well as for post-metal across the board, while exploring new expressive avenues. They succeed in that, readily.
And that they’re doing that work at all is one of Folium Limina‘s greatest strengths as a debut album — it’s almost unfair to call it one; four-fifths of this band isn’t a new band — but it’s the clear sense of purpose, of creating meaning in a time when even the definition of what’s real around us has become a partisan void, when as a species we’re beaten by disease and dismay both and the only ones who seem to have any strength left are the villains, that ultimately positions it as such a thing of beauty. An idea planted in troubled, near-poisonous ground, that has blossomed into something sad but beautiful.
In the interest of complete disclosure, Folium Limina was issued first as an exclusive for Blues Funeral‘s PostWax vinyl subscription service, for which I do the liner notes and am (theoretically, if I ever get to send Jadd my Paypal) compensated. This review was written after discussions with the band, and if you have that version and have read those notes — first, thanks — and second, the story of the album there is somewhat different than here. I’ll put that up to living with Folium Limina longer, hearing it differently, and the fact that listening to great records isn’t a thing that happens and then you put them away; they’re art you experience, and your impressions and an album’s realizations can both change with time and context. In any case, I’m not just repeating the liner notes here because that was their tale to tell about the songs and this is mine — on a procedural level, no one else is approving drafts of a review before it’s published, as evidenced by all the likely typos, half-thoughts and grammatical errors — even if I’m the wordy bastard whose name is on both. Still, compelled to mention it by some in-the-end-meaningless notion of integrity, so it’s been mentioned now. Diligence done.
Given that, and given that The Otolith took on the challenge of writing an album that’s (at least in part) about being absolutely battered by the world around you while waking up to face another day of it and still managed to make it sound not like a drag is emblematic of the roots they’re expanding from and the expansion itself; the effort and the work, then and now. Folium Limina is by no means an easy listen, but these are not easy times, and while it feels like the very gravity of the planet is working to rip the air out of your lungs and take your breath from you, let it be art for salvation. Sing no coda. This is no end.
Posted in Whathaveyou on August 24th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
You wanna hear something dumb? I’m on my way to The Land of Make Believe — an amusement park and Northern New Jersey institute of future childhood injury memories — with The Patient Mrs. and The Pecan for the day, manically trying to cram as much summer in as we can. That’s not the dumb part. The dumb part is I’m all in a panic that I need to get this post up right now because The Otolith’s Folium Limina is so god damned good. Couldn’t wait till tomorrow? Later this afternoon? Evidently not.
“Sing No Coda” is the opening track and first single from the album. It’s brilliant. Listen to it. In my head canon it’s called “Sing No Fucking Coda” because it’s so awesome, but I don’t call it that to anyone because I don’t have friends and if I do they haven’t heard it yet. But you can hear it now, and we can be friends, and then I can say it. That’d be nice.
Preorders are up. And blah blah I did the liner notes for the PostWax release, but I don’t even care. Just listen to the song.
Okay we’re parking the car and I’m out of time. From the PR wire:
Salt Lake City avant-garde doom unit THE OTOLITH (w/ SubRosa members) announce debut album on Blues Funeral Recordings; first track streaming!
Rising from the ashes of Salt Lake City’s beloved avant-garde and symphonic doom juggernauts SubRosa comes THE OTOLITH, who will release their debut album “Folium Limina” on October 21st through Blues Funeral Recordings. First single “Sing No Coda” is available on all streaming platforms, with album preorders now online!
When SubRosa announced its breakup in 2019, the heavy music community felt the loss of their uniquely elegant and intensely heavy atmospheric doom devotionals. Rather than wonder what velvet darkness might still await, however, SubRosa’s Kim Cordray, Levi Hanna, Andy Patterson and Sarah Pendleton swiftly emerged as a new entity called the Otolith, with the addition of Matt Brotherton on bass. Following the same muse of cataclysmic melancholy, THE OTOLITH is ready to shepherd their highly anticipated debut double LP “Folium Limina” into the world, first as part of Blues Funeral Recordings’ revered PostWax Vol. II series*, then in a standalone edition available worldwide.
Drawing no line between beauty and doom, THE OTOLITH’s debut album reveals the musical mutations and mystical wanderings of a soul, scanning the edges of the known universe through cracked glass. Ghostly symphonic strings interlace with crushing bass, guitar and percussion; voices conducting signals across time and space to arrive through cosmic storms to a sea of liquid stars.
Of the epic album opener, violinist and vocalist Sarah Pendleton says: “The riffs for Sing No Coda were cooking in our cauldron for a while, but it wasn’t until after we had weathered 2020 that I started to write the lyrics. I developed a strange, intense hypochondria throughout that year, and I know a few others who did as well. It became maddening, trying to discern fear from reality. But far worse was the loneliness, feeling like the most important relationships and friendships were stretching thin and growing tattered, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Now that the world is (mostly) out of the woods and we are seeing faces and traveling and playing again, it is massively cathartic to sing those words: Sing no coda, by the stream. Instead, my friends, wait, wait for me!”.
The overpowering feeling that emanates from the album’s tar-thick hymns is a stirring combination of exhaustion and determination as if THE OTOLITH took Samuel Beckett’s words to heart: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Every wrenching emotion across the hour-long journey is honest and hard-earned, and you can feel the band digging deep to find a catharsis of collective release. The world is a heavy place, and sometimes it’s good to sit with an old friend and pick up where you left off. With “Folium Limina”, The Otolith invite you to bring your burden and find it lightened – even a little – through the cleansing ritual of richly mournful atmospheric metal.
TRACKLIST: 1. Sing No Coda 2. Andromeda’s Wing 3. Ekpyrotic 4. Hubris 5. Bone Dust 6. Dispirit
Given the band members’ shared history within Salt Lake City’s revered avant-garde doom unit SubRosa, it’s no surprise that THE OTOLITH’s “Folium Limina” is both a continuation of an existing musical conversation and a herald of something entirely new. The album’s six songs are devastatingly heavy, but the band gives equal attention to speaker-rupturing riffs and to dark, immersive atmospheres. Levi Hanna’s guitar and bass steer the ship in a thick, rumbling tandem, while Kim Cordray’s and Sarah Pendleton’s violins push from the center out, sometimes painting the canvas with sharp, melodic leads and others sawing deep into parallel riffing. Andy Patterson’s drums are thunderous and thoughtful, and when the band hits a huge, all- hands-on-deck downbeat, it feels like a mountain tumbling into the hungry sea.
Those who loved SubRosa will find a familiar face of heaviness in THE OTOLITH, but with a more pronounced emphasis on darkwave and neofolk, calling to mind Amber Asylum or Worm Ouroborus. Cordray’s and Pendleton’s vocals are often a lilting dance or somber incantation in close harmony, while Hanna’s bellowing roar is used sparingly but to towering effect. Although the interwoven strings and vocals rush along with graceful intricacy, The Otolith’s primary approach is full-stop heaviness, and they will rattle our bones with the earth-churning tumult of Neurosis as well as the meditative trance of Om.
Readying their live configuration with the addition of Matt Brotherton on bass and preparing to appear at this year’s Monolith on the Mesa festival in Taos, New Mexico, THE OTOLITH will release “Folium Limina” on October 21st, 2022 via the purveyors of immaculate heaviness at Blues Funeral Recordings.
THE OTOLITH is Kim Cordray – Violin, Vocals Levi Hanna – Guitar, Vocals Andy Patterson – Drums, Percussion Matt Brotherton – Bass Guitar, Vocals Sarah Pendleton – Violin, Lead Vocals
