(Andy Synn returns to the darkness with a revitalised Altarage and their new album, out Friday)
There’s an excellent question that Sir Michael Caine once asked, and answered… “why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up again.”
And, make no mistake about it, there’s certainly a pretty decent (and vocal) number of Altarage fans who will be happy – well, not exactly happy – to tell you all about how much the band fell off after their opening salvo of three killer albums (Nihl, Endinghent, and The Approaching Roar) in a row.
Don’t get me wrong, I have some sympathy with this view – as much as I loved the band’s initial trilogy of terror, I was willing to go on record with how disappointed (and disjointed) I felt 2021’s Succumb to be (a position I still stand by), and while I appreciated 2022’s Sol Corrupto a little more than most it definitely still fell short of the band’s usual high standards – but I’m also the sort of person who believes that it’s important for bands to take chances, and that a few experimental misses can sometimes lead to even bigger hits down the line.
Which may well be what we have here, as while 2023’s Worst Case Scenario was clearly informed by the lessons learned from the Succumb/Sol Corrupto sessions, it’s only with the upcoming release of Cogwheel that Altarage seem to have really managed to pick themselves back up again and become the same terrifying force they used to be.
Batman begin.
Let’s get one thing straight right away… yes, Cogwheel might be a little too long for its own good.
Not that I have anything against a good long album, but the sheer sprawl of this record, the surfeit of ambition and excess of ideas on display across its almost seventy-five minute length, means that by the time you reach the end of the aptly-titled – if, in my opinion, slightly superfluous – “Industrial Offering” it’s all too easy to lose track of the wider picture of the album.
At the same time, however, there’s no denying that the humongous scope and scale of the record – four of Cogwheel‘s seven songs crack the ten minute mark (which is more than the rest of their back-catalogue combined), with two of these closing in on fifteen minutes – seems perfectly suited to the unforgiving, overwhelming nature of the music, with the added layers of asphyxiating atmosphere and encroaching ambient dread (if the likes of Godflesh and Khanate weren’t high up amongst their influences before they most definitely are now) only serving to increase the already torturous, tectonic weight of the band’s sound.
That’s not to say they’ve lost their knack for conjuring an absolute maelstrom of discordant metallic noise – tracks like instantly-oppressive opener “Peso Muerto” and the cataclysmic cacophony that is “Future Wreck” continue to feature some of the most gruesome, gut-churning guitars this side of Portal, only now with an extra sense of suffocating, Sunn O))) esque tension added to the mix as well – but their love of bleak, unsettling soundscapes (mid-album mood-piece “1988” doesn’t so much offer a moment of calm as it does a chance to reflect on both the horrors that have passed and those yet to come) has now been turned from a potential weakness into one of their greatest strengths.
This is particularly apparent during the likes of “Wielder” and “Not a Proper Burial” – which might just be the abum’s best song, albeit the bar for that (if “song” is even the right word at this point) is set pretty damn high right from the start – which showcase the incredibly, and increasingly, dense layering of their sound, combining and compressing dissonant, amplifier-melting distortion and abrasive, anxiety-inducing drone into a crushing sonic singularity whose massive gravity exerts a strangely hypnotic compulsion on the listener (with the abrasive, recursive intro of the latter track being a particularly harrowing highlight).
True, as I’ve already hinted at, Cogwheel easily could, and possibly should, have ended with the unorthodox and unforgiving strains of “Ichor”, which continues pushing the record to new extremes of both stream-of-consciousness creativity (is this the first time they’ve incorporated clean vocals? answers on a postcard, please) and calculated sonic depravity over the course of just under fifteen monstrous minutes, but for all that it might outstay its welcome a little it’s also a welcome – albeit purposefully demanding – return to form.
To quote Sir Michael one last time… “nothing that has meaning is easy“, and there’s certainly nothing “easy” about this album.