Review & Album Premiere: JIRM, The Tunnel, the Well, Holy Bedlam
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on March 3rd, 2022 by JJ Koczan
Swedish progressive heavy rockers JIRM release their fifth album, The Tunnel, the Well, Holy Bedlam, tomorrow, March 4. It is the Stockholm four-piece’s first offering to be made through Ripple Music and the second since they announced in early 2018 that they were shortening their name from Jeremy Irons and the Ratgang Malibus, the cumbersome weight of which they’d carried since their founding in 2004 by guitarists Karl Apelmo (also vocals) and Micke Backendal — bassist Viktor Källgren and drummer Henke Perrson joined a few years later and the lineup has been consistent ever since, making their debut with Elefanta in 2009.
Their fourth full-length, Surge Ex Monumentis (review here), came out in 2018 on Small Stone and was enough of a remarkable shift in sound from 2014’s Spirit Knife (review here) and 2011’s recently-reissued Bloom to justify the name change if the convenience factor alone wasn’t enough. The band’s sound had clearly matured, taking on a somewhat darker aspect but resonating with proggy flourish in a way their prior material only hinted at amid its classic-heavy thrust. With The Tunnel, the Well, Holy Bedlam, JIRM continue the forward journey into the uncharted reaches of their own sound.
Across an immersive and sometimes ponderous 52 minutes and six songs, The Tunnel, the Well, Holy Bedlam carves an exploratory place within JIRM‘s canon. Opener “Liquid Covenant” unfolds with a quick-established wash of tone in guitar, bass, keys and drums, and though they’re a little later arriving (still before the two-minute mark), Apelmo‘s vocals become one of the central expressive elements throughout. As much room and reach as his and Backendal‘s guitars have in these pieces, the melodies
carried by the vocals are an essential factor, even in the massive, 12-minute, sax-psych-and-space-doom second track “Deeper Dwell.”
Apelmo becomes the human presence — though I won’t take away from Persson‘s grounding snare either — speaking to the audience from these cosmic depths, slow moving and laced with noise as they are. Even in “You Fly,” which takes a more atmospheric approach to balancing the mix, that remains the case, with echoes ringing out over the swirl that, by the midsection, has moved toward epic in a way that even Surge Ex Monumentis couldn’t quite touch, moving into quiet, acoustic-and-key breadth at the end of the record’s first half.
Whether or not the band was deliberate in their intention to throw off the listener’s expectation, I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem unfeasible given their years together and that The Tunnel, the Well, Holy Bedlam is their fifth LP. Given the stated fact that they recorded across five studios during the pandemic, however, perhaps it makes sense that the songs here feel built up, constructed from a central base and working outward. That’s true certainly of “You Fly,” and “Repent in Blood” opens the second half of the tracklisting with a similar vibe, classically progressive but modern in impact and production, airy enough to float but rhythmically solid and rolling in a nod that remains even after the drums seem to drop out (and return) later on.
“Repent in Blood,” “Carried Away” and closer “Pestilence” all top eight minutes long, and with the sax solo in “Carried Away,” the vocal soul throughout, and the payoff distorted shove in the early stretches of the finale as well as the subsequent build into the crescendo, JIRM show themselves to be not only a mature band, but one still moving to new places in terms of style, defining their personality through their songs and performance in a way that is still of-genre in a sense but beholden to no influence so much as its own. That is to say, while one can pick out varying sides of their material and trace it to a root, what’s grown therefrom is JIRM‘s alone.
Under this moniker or the one prior, they have never sounded so rich or accomplished as they do on The Tunnel, the Well, Holy Bedlam. And if you find yourself feeling submerged or like you have a kind of aurally-induced vertigo at any point in listening, just understand that it’s all going to make JIRM‘s own kind of sense by the time they’re finished. Go along, then, for the ride.
Enjoy:
JIRM on The Tunnel, the Well, Holy Bedlam:
The making of this album has been long and weird to say the least. It has been a journey colored by streams of galactic beams and all that magic and stuff and has shaped this creation into a somewhat new organism. The songs have met our maker and turned back with new predictions of what lies ahead and we are ready to draw swords on the battlefield of sound. ‘The Tunnel The Well Holy Bedlam’ has more or less erupted from the same abyss of darkness as the last record. When making records in the weird way like that of this band, nothing ever turns up like we predicted, and it has evolved into some weird process that we more or less have surrendered ourselves to. So if you like or dislike any of this, we literally can’t be blamed. And the cause being we totally lost control the minute we made our first contact with the making of sound. From that point forward we still hope it remains interesting and keeps blowing our minds.
New album ‘The Tunnel, The Well, Holy Bedlam’ out March 4th on Ripple Music: https://ripplemusic.bandcamp.com/
Stockholm-based heavy rock stalwarts JIRM (formerly Jeremy Irons & the Ratgang Malibus), whose blend of psychedelic heaviness has been gushingly referred to as, “a blissful mixture of Soundgarden at their grooviest and Pink Floyd,” return with their latest album, “The Tunnel, The Well, Holy Bedlam.” The album was assembled in a true reflection of the world as altered by the pandemic, its tracks recorded one by one in five different studios across Sweden. The end result, though, is a massive liftoff from reality that’s sure to appeal to fans of everything from REZN to YOB to Elephant Tree to Cities of Mars. Prepare for an astral-traveling, riff-fueled trip into the cosmos!
JIRM is
Karl Apelmo — vocals, guitar
Micke Backendal — guitar
Viktor Källgren — bass
Henke Persson — drums
