(written by Islander)
As you can see, I have the music of only one band for you today, and only one of their songs rather than a complete release. This is because I have to leave my home and the virtual world (two different places, it may surprise you to know) very early today and didn’t have time to make a head-start yesterday.
I’m again venturing across Puget Sound to join friends for the viewing of a football game featuring our beloved home team. Due to time zone differences the game has an early start, which means I’ll have to decide what kind of alcohol would go best with breakfast, to calm the nerves, which will get jangly even though our team is heavily favored to win the game.
I thought about not posting even this very brief piece, but concluded that I had (barely) enough time for what you’re now about to hear (and perhaps read). The thought of leaving a void for even one day around here bothers me, as does the void that the future will leave as its final gift.
I actually wrote that last sentence before deciding which song to place here. I suppose what I just wrote might have influenced what I picked to share with you. Yet this song, just released on Friday by Irreversible Mechanism from Belarus, would have been a very strong candidate even without the fortuitous coincidence. Even though it doesn’t fit into the usual genre focus of this column, I found the song so electrifying that I didn’t want to delay sharing it.
The song comes with a video, and it’s entirely fitting that the video vividly presents recurring imagery of the Earth undergoing violent convulsions on an enormous scale. It includes images of human civilization too, but the point of the video seems to be that they will not survive, any more than we will. You will also see microscopic organisms; maybe that’s what will survive us.
The video is fitting because the song is itself violent, and as colorful as the volcanic eruptions and molten rivers presented in the video. The music also mimics the enormous heaviness of tectonic plates in motion — if they were feverishly shivering instead of shifting more slowly than snails.
“Into the Void” begins with a musical portent of catastrophe — the throbbing reverberation of some cosmic gong ominously heralding the end times, soon joined by gigantic sonic detonations. And then the drumming pops the listener’s orbs wide open with a hyper-speed assault on the snare. That assault rarely slows down, but the rest of the music and the vocals are also spectacular, and so they don’t make it easy for the beats to steal the show.
Bass-level enormity does seem to shake the earth, and above that the riffing churns and sears, frantically skitters and squirms, groans and screams. The vocals roar, rage, and shriek, and multiple voices elevate in ravishing gang yells. The music also delivers broad cascades of anguished melody and arpeggios of rippling elegance.
But the most eye-popping episode in a thoroughly eye-popping song is a guitar solo that must be heard to be believed; it’s remarkably fast, wild in its composition, and ecstatic in its execution.
Closer to the end, the music slows and becomes more fragile, and haunted singing casts its own pall. A beautiful acoustic guitar melody then provides a bridge to spellbinding singing that soars, and a final collage of sound that might make you thing of birds thronging.
The song is part of Irreversible Mechanism’s complete re-imagining of their 2015 debut album Infinite Fields. They reconstructed and re-recorded each of those songs from the ground up and will release all of them in a new album called Infinite Fields (Re-Wired), which will also include two new songs. It’s scheduled for release on January 15, 2027.
https://irreversiblemechanism.bandcamp.com/
http://www.facebook.com/IrreversibleMechanism
https://www.instagram.com/irreversible.mechanism/