(written by Islander)
The name Starer won’t be new to our regular long-term visitors. We’ve been avidly following and writing about this project (the solo symphonic black metal endeavor of Kentucky-based Josh Hines) off and on for the last five years, almost from the issuance of Starer‘s first singles in 2020.
In that time, Starer has released five albums and a multitude of shorter works. The fifth album, Ancient Monuments and Modern Sadness, was released overnight, and we’re sharing it at NCS today. Because the album has been out for some hours, this feature may technically be more of a “news” item and review than a premiere, but it’s close enough that I’m sticking with the post title.
The new album is distinctive in more ways than one. Conceptually, as its title suggests, it is a collection of “8 songs of ancient poetry set to a heavy modern soundtrack” (to quote Hines). Those ancient inspirational roots are reflected in the lyrics and in artwork accompanying the album, both on its cover and in the physical editions that are now being released (more on that later).
As the title also suggests, the music is also rooted in modern sadness, as a way of expressing and working out the creator’s sorrow, and as a medicine for what ails the rest of us. Here is one comment Josh Hines made to Starer‘s followers:
I was dealing with considerable grief while working on this album and it feels somewhat therapeutic to finally know other people are going to experience my outlet. I hope it connects with you and, if you need it to, helps you get through dark times. Thank you all.
These days, simply waking up and reading about current events both here in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world is enough to induce depression, wholly apart from whatever struggles people may be going through in their personal lives, though all that is also capable of inducing rage.
Starer‘s new album seems to express both emotions, and does such with such visceral intensity and often monumental scale that it has the capacity to rock people back on their heels. It funnels strong emotions, makes strong emotional connections, shatters complacency, creates catharsis, casts spells. It’s fair to say that Starer has always done all this to one degree or another, but the new album achieves those effects (and others) to a degree that surmounts what has come before.
The music often blazes in grit-edged harmonies that seem simultaneously desperate, distraught, yearning, and fierce. It sears and sweeps in ways that engulf the listener’s senses, and achieves an even tighter grip thanks to both powerful drumwork that’s relentlessly dynamic and also equally nimble bass-lines (also impressively dynamic – and very heavy).
As you might expect from Josh Hines‘ statement quoted above, the vocals are caustic snarls and screams of torment, grief, despair, and/or fury that pour out blood and soul at the borderline of catastrophe, seeming to hold nothing back (though you’ll here some reverent singing in the mix too during “So, You Traitor” and the soaring chorale of “Lie Around My Neck,” and growled spoken words in “Song of the Harper”).
To be clear, the songs aren’t non-stop conflagrations of sound. While they do routinely (and breathtakingly) scale summits of incendiary tumult and expand with “widescreen” symphonic sweep, they also slow, allowing notes reminiscent of ancient stringed instruments to elegantly ring their own melodies of sorrow and hope, or to allow more modern instrumentation (including sounds of classical instruments) to moan, throb, weep, and wail. These softer passages of poignance dynamically offset the phases that monumentally tower. (Sometimes the guitars and keys also seem to dance even as they mourn.)
To be clear again, even when Starer is sending the music high and far, even at the pinnacles of its grandeur and scale, the sorrow is usually inescapable, the distress inconsolable (see, for example, “Immortality of Writers” and “Song of the Harper”), though it must be said that sometimes the musical panoramas seem to create splendid visions of what the world might be if better natures could triumph.
The songs also sometimes seem to incorporate traditions of ancient Near Eastern and Middle Eastern music, exotic to western ears and in keeping with some of the album’s artwork (two examples, but not the only ones, being the exhilarating grandeur expressed in “The Field of Reeds” and the daunting anguish channeled through “So, You Traitor”).
So many musical traditions elaborately intersect across the album, brought together from across disparate regions and many millennia, creating a sonic amalgam of antiquity and modernity under the banner of black metal. It’s an enormously impressive and thoroughly captivating album, and one I suspect will hover in the heads of anyone who hears it as we reach year-end list season (and beyond).
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CREDITS:
All sounds by Josh Hines. Wind chimes by Boo. Mastered by Neil Schneider. Cover art from Tomb of the Diver.
Ancient Monuments and Modern Sadness is being released beginning today by Fiadh Productions on tape and CD, and by Adirondack Black Mass on vinyl. Through Snow Wolf Records, Starer also has some copies available of all the above. Find more info via the links below.
ORDER:
https://starer.bandcamp.com/album/ancient-monuments-and-modern-sadness-2
https://adirondackblackmass.bandcamp.com/album/ancient-monuments-modern-sadness
https://adirondackblackmass.bigcartel.com/
https://fiadh.bandcamp.com/album/ancient-monuments-and-modern-sadness
FOLLOW STARER:
https://www.instagram.com/starermusic
https://www.facebook.com/starermusic