Russian Circles
Cloakroom
RUSSIAN CIRCLES
Perhaps the most immediately apparent characteristic of the fifth Russian Circles album, Memorial is its wide range of emotion. Vacillating from somber-yet-soaring melodies on one track to pummeling metal heft on the next, Memorial sounds like an album with split personalities.
Where one song showcases guitarist Mike Sullivan, drummer Dave Turncrantz and bassist/keyboardist Brian Cook’s mastery of lush melancholic melody, the next exhibits their most abrasive underground metal leaning sound, with washed-out 16th-note riffs and crushing rhythms. The band’s penchant for endless hooks remains a constant, but Memorial embodies their most dramatic ranges in tone.
„We’ve always tried to balance our metal-influenced sounds with more nuanced, pretty, orchestral elements,“ Cook says. „But this time, it’s far more polarized in that the heavy parts are much more blown out and exaggerated while the pretty moments are far more restrained, delicate, and atmospheric.“ In the two years since Russian Circles released their landmark fourth album Empros, the Chicago trio toured worldwide nearly incessantly, encountering many heavy acts whose music seemed needlessly complicated. „We set out to make a straightforward, intense, heavy record,“ Cook explains. „We subconsciously gravitated toward darker and more somber sounds. We wanted to get away from the overtly flashy.“
In search of such a streamlined sound, the trio focused on each individual song having its own emotional and musical characteristics. As such, Memorial almost feels like stages of grief. That notion might be aided by 1) the album’s clever structuring, in which it ends in the same place as it starts, and 2) special guest vocalist Chelsea Wolfe lending her hauntingly somber vocals to the album closing title track.
To a degree, the monolithic, juxtaposed moods on Memorial is the band’s reaction to the proliferation of iPod culture affecting how bands write music. Today, most musicians are trying to mash together disparate elements with results sounding as unpalatable as cooking a meal blindfolded. Russian Circles wisely and deftly sidestep the trappings of genre amalgamation. „I want to hear a band with a broad palette,“ Cook says. „But it should find that weird balance with breadth and width. We wanted to make a record with more extreme peaks and valleys. I’m hoping that we can get away with making a schizophrenic record
CLOAKROOM
Further Out, the anticipated debut full length from the reclusive Indiana trio Cloakroom, can be defined best as an exploratory sonic mission. From the album’s opener, “Paperweight,” the crushing force of a wall of distorted bass and pounding drumming collapses to uncover the airy, reverb-soaked vocals of guitarist Doyle Martin, who’s carrying a sullen burden that seems just as weighed down. From the headbanging heaviness of “Moon Funeral” to the ethereal moments of songs like “Starchild Skull” and Mesmer,” Cloakroom’s output is the end result of researching seemingly dissimilar elements like atmospheric post-rock, punishingly slow stoner metal, and cathartic emo and how their best qualities can work into a final, organic sound, masterfully navigated by the expert and completely analog production of Matt Talbot. Further Out boasts the timelessness of a classic record: it is expansive and exploratory while still reflective and referential to the astral tendencies of predecessors like Hum and Jesu. Further Out, available now in two easy volumes.
