Aesthetic Death

The Leibnizian monad is an atom that mirrors the universe. As the cover art suggests, Farer’s ’monad’ is likewise not a featureless singularity, but involuted and fractured, the cosmos compressed into a trash compactor. It’s both dense and sparse, personal and impersonal, at rest and in motion, all at once. There is clear influence from ‘post-metal’ bands like Neurosis, Isis, Sumac, etc. But using a second bass instead of any guitars results in a completely different, in fact much bleaker and less familiar soundscape. The basic tone is a fuzzy metallic squelching, somewhere between a hammer striking an anvil and a boot being pulled from mud. Distorted basses are naturally quite inarticulate and, at whatever pitch, less ‘full-sounding’ than guitars – a fact which Farer exploits to create differently textured masses of noise, layered together and melded by the driving impulsive rhythms, heightened by deftly controlled feedback and other technical effects. The vocals are also jarring and unfamiliar: the high-pitch shrieks and shouts provoke unease where a leonine growl a la Aaron Turner would be all too comfortable. There is more suspense than catharsis. Overall, a serious triumph that is much deeper than it may perhaps seem at first. It will subsume and absorb listeners who give it their full attention.
Rating: ★★★★★