Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
“This circle was a temple which had been devoured by ancient fires, profaned by the miasmal jungle, and whose god no longer received the homage of men.” So wrote Jorge Luis Borges in his short story “The Circular Ruin.” In it, a man undertakes a quest to dream a new person into being. He sleeps for months in the ruins of a temple that once belonged to a deity of flame, using wizardry and his slumbering visions to conjure a full-grown son, organ by organ, into existence. But his quest comes with a price: a shattering realization about the nature of existence, and of otherness, that’s too terrible in its geometric perfection to sanely abide.
Neurosis are no strangers to circularity and otherness. The Oakland-based post-metal collective turns 30 this year, though when its members convened in the mid-’80s, there was only a hint that they’d become the entity capable of creating their 1996 masterpiece, Through Silver in Blood. Neurosis’ debut album, 1987’s Pain of Mind, was a vicious, breakneck amalgam of crust and hardcore with fuck-the-system songs like “United Sheep” and “Life on Your Knees.” Pretty standard fare for the Reagan era, but it didn’t take long for the band to begin evolving—and rapidly. Each release, from 1990’s TheWord as Law to 1992’s Souls at Zero to 1993’s Enemy of the Sun, progressed exponentially from the album before it. The addition, in 1989, of singer/guitarist Steve Von Till to the group’s core—singer/guitarist Scott Kelly, bassist Dave Edwardson, and drummer Jason Roeder—accelerated the band’s rate of experimentation. So did the recruitment of a full-time keyboardist and sample manipulator in 1990 (first Simon McIlroy, then Noah Landis, who has served since 1995), which proved that Neurosis’ hardcore chrysalis was something they were eager to shed.
The band’s ambition greatly stretched their canvas. After allowing metallic elements to creep into The Word as Law—an album released on Lookout! Records, which made Neurosis, oddly enough, labelmates with Green Day—a far more sprawling vision informed Souls at Zero and Enemy of the Sun. The three-minute salvos of Pain of Mind were gone; in their place were staggering opuses like “Cleanse,” which ends Enemy of the Sun on a 26-minute, Crash Worship-esque eruption of chants and tribal percussion. Lyrics no longer concerned themselves with middle fingers raised at modern society. Instead, a sense of pagan awe seeped into Neurosis, to the point where the straw-effigy cover art of Souls at Zero drew inspiration from the pagan horror film The Wicker Man. Tellingly, the final ten minutes of the album comprise a maddening, heavily effected vocal loop that bounces from speaker to speaker, a hint of the unsettling circularity of their next album: Through Silverin Blood.
In addition to the band celebrating its 30th anniversary, Through Silver in Blood turned 20 earlier this year. It’s an album of cyclical mystique. Like “The Circular Ruin” and so many other Borges stories, Through Silver oscillates like an intricate orrery of loops within loops, contained by even greater loops—elusive and extra-dimensional. Whether intentional or not, the album’s closing track, “Enclosure in Flame,” evokes “The Circular Ruin”: “I will open a door and bleed in your dreams,” go the words, howled over a churning, gargantuan guitar motif before concluding, “Silently praying for enclosure/Within the flame of origin.”
“I’d say this record is more of an epic undertaking than the last one,” Dave Edwardson said in a 1996 interview, speaking about Through Silver. It might have been the understatement of the year. Neurosis’ fifth full-length isn’t just a proclamation; it’s a monolith. At the height of the CD age, when bands felt obliged to push the format’s data capacity to the limit, the album uncoils accordingly—a 70-minute odyssey into inhuman realms of weirdness. The title track is a layering of tidal sludge, depth-of-hell screams, and undulating lurches of riffage. “Eye” roils like a weaponized storm; “Aeon” lulls with a cello-and-violin-spiced, chamber-folk intro before going seismic.
Infamously, the scathing sheets of discordance that punctuate “Purify”—not to mention the bloodcurdling refrain of “sacrifice the flesh,” which sounds less like a commandment and more like an ecstatic release—give way to the most ethereal bagpipes ever committed to record. They’re made all the more arresting for their sonic and cognitive dissonance, sounding a bit like an ancient incantation reverberating through the centuries. On “Locust Star,” which remains a staple of Neurosis’ lives sets, the earthly corruption of religion is thrown on a bed of nails: “Your belief is scars.” In the hands of a younger Neurosis, it would’ve been just another hardcore screed; here it’s poetic and ambiguous, a probing of the theistic impulse with the tip of a dagger.
The pieces of each song are simple, if not downright elemental—but they’re locked together to form a complex apparatus of mud, bone, and stone. Synths, samples, effects, and amplification are bent toward a paradox. Unlike Radiohead’s comparably vast and innovative OK Computer from the following year, technology isn’t used to comment on the alienating nature of technology; instead, technology is used to mask its own inherent coldness.Organic yet mechanistic, dense yet severe, Through Silver is industrial music as it might have been imagined by a preindustrial people.
It’s also trippy as hell. As Edwardson commented, “[Through Silver] is a very spiritual statement to us dealing with humanity’s place in the cosmos and dealing directly with alchemy and psychedelics.” The ability to hypnotize and transport is one of the album’s most powerful aspects, especially considering its mercilessly pummeling design. Like the extended creative nightmare that afflicts the unnamed protagonist of “The Circular Ruin,” Through Silver taps into various rhythms: circadian, seasonal, astronomical, and above all, ritualistic. Alchemy and psychedelics are uttered in the same breath for good reason: The album’s cover, which depicts two entwined snakes in one of the oldest alchemical symbols, emblematizes the idea of infinity through repetition. The riffs are synched to that waveform, even as the songs coalesce into a fugue state of doubt, fear, confusion, rage, and the quest for meaning in chaos.
Neurosis came from hardcore—as well as drawing plenty of dark matter from Swans, Godflesh, Amebix, Melvins, and Joy Division (whose “Day of the Lords” has been a favorite cover of theirs for decades)—but Through Silver was the point at which the metal scene finally began to embrace them. After the group’s stints on Lookout! as well as Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles, Through Silver landed at Relapse, which was then become one of metal’s most progressive labels. They were invited to play the inaugural Ozzfest in 1996; they also went on tour with Pantera at the height of the latter’s popularity.
“[Pantera] can play places that we really can’t,” Scott Kelly told an interviewer in early 1997. “We can’t play the smallest club in town because of our setup and the power constraints. On the other hand, we don’t sell enough records to play the bigger places.” By “setup and power constraints,” he meant the ever-growing stage spectacle that Neurosis needed to complement their huge sound. In addition to the massive amounts of equipment needed to replicate the lush, textured studio sound of Through Silver, they augmented their performance with a dizzying light show that helped make Neurosis shows feel like druidic rites.
These days, Neurosis concerts are a bit less immersive. The band still sounds as mighty as ever, but there’s less importance placed on ritual and mystery: They come out, they play the songs, and they’re devastating, simple as that. Their recorded legacy, though, is as mystifying as ever. Following Through Silver, they released 1999’s Times of Grace, an album as gaunt and ferociously focused as Through Silver is extravagant. Since then, their output has proceeded undiminished. From 2001’s A Sun That Never Sets to 2012’s Honor Found in Decay, they continually spiraled around their biomechanical core, a place where death and rebirth, destruction and construction are locked into a metaphysical rhythm. In the process, they’ve influenced countless bands, from Isis to Sleep to Russian Circles to Dead to a Dying World. The melding of so many genres—hardcore, metal, prog, folk, industrial, crust—has taken on an alchemical force of its own. At the same time, Neurosis inhabits their own hermetic sphere, a place where the mist-shrouded past and some dystopian future collide and resolve, over and over, infinitely.
Neurosis’ twelfth full-length arrives in a few weeks (September 23), and its title, Fires Within Fires, forges another parallel to Borges’ “The Circular Ruins.” At one point in the story, the temple’s fire god appears to guide to the protagonist as he crafts a man from the stuff of his dreams. But in a meta-narrative twist, the man discovers he’s as much of a dreamed creation as the new human he’s bringing into being. As it turns out, we’re all echoes, replicas, motifs in the pattern of spacetime, “for what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself.” Listening to the cosmic repetitiveness of Through Silver in Blood, it feels all too eerily possible.