(written by Islander)
In the moments of silence, when we have slipped from rooms and the gaze and demands of others, we can wander through all that has been, hold the precious, present moment in our hands and weigh both our delights and despair with reasoned measure.
Those are the words that serve as a preamble to a forthcoming debut album named Heritage that we found in press materials for the album. The album, which we’re now premiering in full, is the work of a project named Structure, one established in 2021 by Dutch musician Bram Bijhout, who is perhaps best known for his guitar work with Officium Triste, whom he served for seven years.
That preamble and the album’s name (and its cover image) point toward what inspired it, as Bram has explained:
Heritage is about family, history and all that makes us who we are. It is about loss and hope and all emotions that fuel us on an everyday basis. These songs turned out to be the heaviest ones written for Structure, and the help of some great friends made this an album that i am very proud of. It is a very personal album about what we become in life through our Heritage and experiences. The pictures on the artwork are from my personal family photo albums which I received after my grandfather died.
In that quote Bram mentions friends who contributed to the shape of the album. The music includes lead vocals from Pim Blankenstein (Officium Triste), drums by Dirk Bruinenberg (Elegy), and additional vocals from Robert Soeterboek (Plan 9, Ayreon). (Bram wrote the music and lyrics and performed guitars, bass, and keyboards.)
For reasons now obvious, you may be expecting the kind of atmospheric doom/death metal for which Officium Triste is so well known. And it’s likely that fans of Officium Triste will thoroughly enjoy Heritage. But Structure, as manifested on Heritage, isn’t a clone of that statuesque band.
The album is one of those that draws comparisons to an elaborate tapestry of events — yet another example of our odd tendency as listeners to compare what we hear to what we see. The comparison comes to mind because the music seems painstakingly crafted and is often richly adorned and intricate, yet everything is woven together in ways that create a cohesive and powerful portrait, a portrait of people (really, all of us) placed within the context of where we came from, how we were shaped by those who preceded us in life and our interactions with them or their memories, and how those experiences might still be learned from as we stumble ahead toward our own end times.
So one way to think about the album is as a meditation, and at times it is “meditative”, in the sense of music that creates relatively quiet periods for reflection. But in this tapestry that’s only one of many contrasting sensations woven throughout the album’s seven songs, because the subjects of this musical reflection are thoughts born from loss and grief, confusion and frustration, a desire to honor the past in the midst of doubts about the future. Or at least those are among the emotions captured and channeled through the music.
In rendering this tapestry/portrait/meditation, Heritage can become very heavy indeed — immensely so. It includes crashing and crushing guitars capable of brutally scathing the senses with their distortion, drums that resemble stunning cannonades and avalanche boulders, bass lines that seem capable of thrumming the earth’s mantle, and of course Pim Blankenstein‘s vast roars, harrowing howls, and strangled growls (is anyone better than him at what he does?).
But those aren’t the only ingredients. The music also flows like storm-tossed seas, covering the listener in dense and submerging waves, waves of melody that frighteningly crest and heavily come down, driving us under. It includes magnificently soulful guitar solos that spiral high, themselves channeling a range of moods as they do.
The music further includes enormous throbbing grooves, crushers for sure, but often buoyant in their liveliness, but on the other hand the music frequently moves at the pace of funeral doom — immense, staggering, and soul-stricken. It also occasionally includes symphonic strings that are both quietly mournful and ominously towering, as well as gleaming ambient flows that inspire visions of untold mystery and frightening wonder.
Further still, in some songs you’ll hear ardent spoken- and near-sung words and haunted gasps, and also cracking back-beats, rippling riffs that manifest anguish and agony, beautifully ringing arpeggios that sound like loving reminiscences, other arpeggios that sound like the weeping of an old squeeze-box or slowly glisten in their poignancy, and chords that grievously drag and moan, like the dying movements of a leviathan. There seems to be an old folk influence in some of the sounds and melodies, in keeping with the album’s conception of Heritage.
No matter how rendered, the melodies are always key, immaculately crafted to carry very human emotional states, including reflections of what we lose in the deaths of others (near and far in time), what we might discover in life, and how to make sense of its ultimate futility — or at least that’s how I’m interpreting what I hear — with the pacing and weight of the music carefully attuned to the melodies’ changing moods.
And well, there’s more. But rather than try to provide an exhaustive catalogue of all the strands of light and dark in this vast tapestry, and all the moods they portray, it’s better to make one last and important note: This isn’t an album where one song is this and the next song is that. Each song is itself a mini-tapestry in the grander whole, each of them ebbing and flowing in sonic power, each one interweaving many of the ingredients we’ve mentioned to create music of authentic emotional power.
Maybe there will be a better album of doom/death metal this year than Heritage, one better at summoning the humbling and haunting weight of the past and the daunting and fearsome weight of the future, but at this point it’s hard to believe that. This one is such a stunner, such a magnificently moving achievement, that it seems likely to stand tall like a towering monument even at year-end.
Heritage was mixed by Bram Bijlhout, and it was mastered by Dool bass player J.B. Van Der Wal. It will be released by Ardua Music on April 25th on digipack CD, and it will be available digitally from Structure.
PRE-ORDER:
https://arduamusic.bandcamp.com/album/heritage
https://structure-doom.bandcamp.com/album/heritage
STRUCTURE:
https://structure-doom.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Structure.Doom