THE VISIT - Through Darkness Into Light (2015)

Review by: Ali Ghoneim
Album assigned by: Kevin O'Meara

This album is to metal what Sparks’ Lil Beethoven is to electronic music.

Or at least that’s the conclusion I — someone who hasn’t listened to much metal beyond Sabbath — have made after listening to a 55 minute long “metal” album with no guitars. The metal tag comes from the band’s bandcamp page, so know that I’m not making any assumptions here.

Purely in terms of form and structure, I can see how someone could argue that this is a metal album. Chugging guitars are replaced with cellos, but you can still recognise the music that they’re playing as distinctly metal — again I don’t know much about metal so take that with a grain of salt. 

Prior to listening to this album, I had been aware that some metal acts liked to mix a lot of baroque/orchestral passages into their songs, but I was under the impression that those passages would then eventually gave way to stereotypical metal fair. Here, however, the whole album seems to be one prolonged ornate passage, which really caught me off guard the first time I listened to it. Here I was thinking: “Ok, the guitars are definitely gonna come in now….ok now……now?” But they never did, and the album was a much more interesting and engaging “metal” album because of it.

To be completely fair, it might very well be that these kind of metal albums sans guitar and drums are common, and that the visit isn’t doing anything new. In that case, my opening statement is a lot of hyperbole from someone who doesn’t know shit about metal. But AS someone who doesn’t know shit about metal, Through Darkness Into Light was a pretty enlightening listen. 

LE TRIO JOUBRAN - As Fâr (2011)

Review by: Kevin O'Meara
Album assigned by: Ahmed Khālid

Upon receiving my album recommendation- Asfâr by Le Trio Joubran- I knew that I had been presented with a daunting task. Being a relatively uncultured Canadian man, I unfortunately had no frame of reference for evaluating Palestinian folk music. I obviously heard music like it before, but the sources have inevitably been unreliable and intrinsically tied to particular imagery. Often appropriated in media as placeholder soundtrack music, I have not explored the genre in a meaningful way.  I was excited to hear it in context, freed from visual associations and abstracted from immediate visual associations.

Of course, a similar issue also emerges from the context of the music- the fact that it is inextricably politicized. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a prevalent and contentious issue for a long time, and the cultural implications presents me, a simple music reviewer, with some potential difficulties. To say that this band is from Palestine would be met with raised eyebrows in a number of circles in the western world, and to make any claims pertaining to the issue would best be left to experts. As it stands, I do not adhere to any dogmatic view and only wish for peace and love for all people, regardless of their nationality. My job right now is merely to evaluate the contents within the proverbial jewel case.

As Fâr was released in 2011 and is the most recent album by Le Trio Joubran, three Palestinian brothers joined by percussionist Youssef Hbeisch and vocalist Dhafer Youssef on a number of tracks. They have won several awards for their soundtrack work and promulgation of Palestinian culture. They split their time between Nazareth, Ramallah and Paris, having recorded Asfâr in the French capital.

The songs are all relatively similar, being in minor keys and the instrumentation being limited to three ouds, percussion and occasional vocals. They are almost all uptempo, but are easily differentiated by their arrangements. As I mentioned, I lack a precise context to determine how this album sits within the genre as a whole, and it is difficult for me to hear the nuances that set the songs apart from one another. Nonetheless, the different permutations of the musical elements, such as sparse percussion/ vocals combinations resolving into oud sections, allow the songs to evolve, continue propelling forward and keep things fresh. Excessive reverb has the potential to turn beautiful music, for lack of a better word, tacky. Thankfully, it is used tastefully and sparingly on the album, emphasizing the beauty of each note and allowing the instruments to breathe.

As little as I wanted to emphasize the social context within which it was created, the emotions of the brothers, the spirit of a nation could be felt pulsing through the pieces. This album was a captivating experience, flawlessly executed and a pure joy to listen to. While not a progressive masterpiece, that is not what its purpose. To assign a numerical value to a piece of art meant to inspire love and hope in a battered nation is to strip it of its significance. The music was not made to capitalize on the novelty of this genre, it is not merely an insincere excursion into the art form for arts sake, with the express purpose of garnering critical acclaim. This music comes from a rich cultural history that, with each note, expresses a unique perspective of the human experience. The only proper way to evaluate such an album would be to acknowledge how it affected me, and I can certainly say that I will be returning to the album again.

I am writing this review in light of the recent attacks on Paris, wherein 89 people were killed at an Eagles Of Death Metal concert. Le Trio Joubran, as I mentioned recorded their album in Paris. In our postmodernist society, many people behave as cynical critics, privileged defenders of irony. It takes a piece like this to remind people of the importance of music on our lives. Music should not be regarded as a valueless pastime, meaningless background noise as we go about our lives. Music is legitimately meaningful cultural expression that should not be evaluated according to the number of sales or a rating out of 10 that it has. As feeling fades and people like myself disjoin themselves from this realization, they will begin once again to view music critically and try and attribute to it a value based on its progressive tendencies. However, we should always keep in mind why we listen to music in the first place.

Life is important and music is a mode of expression that many find offensive or try to suppress. However, music remains one of the only anthropological constants, something that people of all backgrounds can relate to on a primal level. On Asfâr, I hear these men communicating in an unfamiliar musical language, but thankfully we can transcend these barriers and appreciate the beauty no matter who we are or where we come from. The expression of music is universal, and it is of the utmost importance that we appreciate its value and importance.

BOSVELD - Veldbrand (2015)

Review by: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Album assigned by: Kevin O'Meara

When I was assigned to review the album Veldbrand by the group Bosveld I thought at first, based on the name alone, that this was gonna be some kind of Scandinavian Death Metal type deal or at least something along the lines of that glum drone-y sound that seems to be gaining so much traction these days. You see to my ignorant mind the name Bosveld and the title Veldbrand conjured up scenes involving violent thunderstorms and a mist drenched purple darkness, men in thick hooded robes performing uncanny rites to summon up horrible preternatural entities, loud guitars played at insanely fast speeds and for vocals an unholy growling that seemed to be forcing its way through the earth up from the very pit of hell itself. And so rather understandably I began to steel myself for an all out assault on my eardrums. But no what I got instead is a sonically understated piece of atmospheric electro-folk that creeps along at a very slumberous pace indeed and which has a tendency to take itself more seriously than it maybe should. At times the hushed, world weary vocals are reminiscent of Mark Lanegan, that is if he’d been less fond of cheap whisky and cheaper women, and instead preferred brooding alone in an abandoned woodshed with a only a record player and a battered copy of Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear for company; other times the vocals float along over a surface of quivering strings and earnest folky guitar like John Martyn on tranquilizers. 

Bosveld are all about building up a very particular kind of atmosphere, something like an autumn sunset squinted at from an abandoned woodshed in a temperate forest, and so they make few concessions to such mundane musical niceties such as melody or audible lyrics (I’m not even sure what language it is the vocalist is singing in a lot of the time). Veldbrand is essentially an ambient-folk record, somewhat in the vein of the aforementioned Veckatimest except that unlike Grizzly Bear Bosveld seem to regard musical hooks and memorable choruses as a distraction, and extraneous to their purposes. It must be granted that understood as a piece of ambient music in which each individual element is subsumed to the purpose of evoking a general feeling or sense of place, Veldbrand is not an ineffective record: that is, even if there are no melodies that stick around in your head, the hushed atmosphere of the piece does in fact linger on as insubstantial as a photographic afterimage after you stop listening, and the effect seems to last just as long as an afterimage usually does.  

Everything is pervaded by an ominous feeling of lethargy and a vague kind of uneasiness, It’s just obtrusive enough that you probably wouldn’t want to leave it on at a polite dinner party. That is to say it’s not background music in the most trite and offensive sense of the word and this redeems the record somewhat. But for all that in the end Veldbrand is underwhelming: it does not offer an interesting enough soundscape to really succeed as a compelling piece of ambient music -- although it might work well as a film soundtrack -- which makes me think that they were perhaps a little rash to think they could do away with melodies and hooks just yet. (5.5/10)