Review & Track Premiere: Demetra Sine Die, Post Glacial Rebound
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on June 6th, 2018 by JJ Koczan
[Click play above to stream the title-track of Demetra Sine Die’s Post Glacial Rebound. Album is out this month on Third I Rex.]
Their sound varies more or less on a per-song basis, if not a within-song basis, so if you’re looking for an easy-genre-tag-and-move-on kind of listen, look elsewhere. Demetra Sine Die‘s third offering, Post Glacial Rebound (on Third-I-Rex), requires cerebral engagement at almost all times. It’s like a movie with crucial plotpoints happening every minute, and that’s not a comparison I make lightly. The music itself throughout the seven tracks/46 minutes of the release is richly cinematic, and with vocals swapping between speaking, singing and screaming parts, one might listen to a song like the nine-minute black metal/noise-until-it-decides-not-to-be centerpiece “Gravity” and the later brooding swirl of the melodic “Liars” and wonder if it’s the same band.
Seems to be, yeah. Black metal is part of their approach, but by no means the totality. The Genoa, Italy, three-piece of Adriano Magliocco and founders Marco Paddeu and Marcello Fattore blend elements from noise rock, doom, post-metal and prog together to create a sound that reminds almost of Norwegian avant pioneers Virus in its encompassing style, but Demetra Sine Die‘s divisions are stark, and the tension they hold in “Lament” or the later moments of the closing title-track — a flurry of drums backing spacious clean vocals there — has a presence of its own.
The album is a multi-tiered challenge, then, since not only does it make such a requirement of attention, but it pays off that effort at its own will, without compromise, when and where it wants. That title-track, by the way? Yeah, it just ends. Cold. As if to reinforce the purview the listener is under and the idea of just who it is Demetra Sine Die are making this music for.
Themselves, if it’s not obvious. This kind of progressive, constantly shifting, varied sound of course isn’t without its tinge of self-indulgence. That’s practically a requirement. Still, with the breadth that Paddeu, Fattore and Magliocco cast from the opening bassline of the deceptively grunge and patiently executed leadoff “Stanislaw Lem” onward into the headfirst collision between melody and dissonance in the subsequent “Birds are Falling” and down through the rest of Post Glacial Rebound that follows, the sense is not that they’re trying to manifest chaos, but that their manner of expression simply refuses convention.
For example, “Birds of Calling” starts with shouts over distorted low end and an oft-heard torrent of drums, straightens out into a long forward, dual-vocal melodic verse, then turns back quickly to the shouts before renewing its push. It passes the halfway mark in this manner, then at 3:21, the progression shifts into a noisy lead that itself gives way to an effects-laden shove of a riff that closes out. Where did that riff come from? I have no idea. It just kind of showed up, but if you’re willing to go with it, Demetra Sine Die make it worth your while, in that track and the drama of “Lament” immediately following, which undergoes its own transformation from a poetry reading over drone to a drum-led build of vague spoken words swallowed by driving post-metallic riffs and, a bit later, screams and growls as it moves toward its apex.
So, shit is weird? Yeah. Definitely. But it’s worth underscoring that Post Glacial Rebound isn’t just weird for its own sake, and it isn’t simply a work of self-indulgence. That ending of “Lament,” which delves into more extreme sounds seemingly out of nowhere, leads to and ultimately smooths the transition into “Gravity,” which marks the darkest and harshest moment on the record. I don’t know that the one song was written to complement the other, but it certainly feels like it was at least positioned that way when the album was actually put together after being recorded.
Likewise, “Gravity,” with its airy guitar and half-gurgled howls early, its middle-third onslaught and its ending melodic moans, in turn serves as an entry point into the even stranger second half of the outing, as “Eternal Transmigration” takes hold — the shortest inclusion at 4:08 — with laughter backing the spoken line “Free your spirit” as if to undercut the very notion. Echoing declarations are subsumed by noise and drums, and that itself bleeds into the more-straightforward-if-you’d-dare-to-call-it-that “Liars,” which rides loud/quiet tradeoffs and an easy melody that, in context, retains some of the threat of its surroundings without actually needs to make an assault of its own. Once again, effects fill out the arrangement, and Demetra Sine Die hold together the proceedings atop a consistent movement of drums.
With a last-minute devolution into ambience, “Liars” gives ground to the closing title-track, which opens much the same way. It would be hard to imagine Demetra Sine Die summarizing the entire record in one track, and even as “Post Glacial Rebound” approaches the nine-minute mark and moves from lumbering low end and roomy guitar over top to a reignited tension in the drums and moaning clean vocals to its almost Tool-esque prog metal finish of percussion and melody, the impetus seems less to reinforce how far the three-piece have journeyed than how far they might still go.
And fair enough. As the follow-up to 2012’s A Quiet Land of Fear and 2008’s debut, Council from Kaos, Post Glacial Rebound leaves some questions unanswered as to just where Demetra Sine Die are headed musically, but is nothing if not purposeful in that. Nonetheless mature, the band in no way sound like they’ve finished growing, nor like they will anytime soon. That might be the most progressive aspect of these tracks. Not only are they thoughtfully composed and executed, but they can’t help but lead the mind of the listener to imagine what Demetra Sine Die might do next.
