- It’s easy to be over-awed by the ease with which this band slide -or crash- genres into each other, but, on the other hand, if you consider their output to date, almost imperceptibly creeping up on us, they’ve been building an even more surprising consistency of sound. Whatever else you might say about veteran Australian prog-metallers Tangled Thoughts Of Leaving, it’s a blessing to hear a band described as doom jazz and to realise, hey! That’s not actually bull****.
Honestly, listening to No Tether side by side with records like Yield To Despair and Failed By Man And Machine and -for a band that takes through-composing to the extreme- if you were going to be a jerk you could say that the most significant difference is whether they decided to arbitrarily divide their music into little tracks (as on No Tether, at least in some versions) or leave it in giant, more musically intuitive slabs (like Failed).
Over the years TToL have actually slimmed down the number of styles they’re prepared to play: you won’t hear any more idm noodling its way into their stuff. There’s been a steady -if almost glacially slow- refinement in focus, which you can really appreciate in the uncompromising sound of their latest material. The interplay of styles occur as sections in the music and there’s a powerful self-control in the way they’re deployed. A giant tract of post-rock and doom is bracketed, given a sense of shape by a gentle jazz lilt here, a ghostly refrain of ambient echoes or a structuring math-rock rhythm there.
Every style they employ is given time to simmer and percolate and I’d probably have to get out a stopwatch to measure, but it’s possible that the post-rock / doom meld is given just a little more space to roar than the others. It’s worth it: the extreme trebles they bring from post-rock at it the height of its decibel range, becomes a kind of inverse to the traditional sound of doom. This is made most obvious on the epic Signal Erosion, where the band transition from that unique shrieking back into a more traditional, fuzzy doom thunder.
The careful, incremental development of TToL’s style has moved them surprisingly far from the main game of contemporary prog metal, especially in Australia: Dead Letter Circus or Karnivool this ain’t. It isn’t like Opeth or Between The Buried And Me either. If I had to say, the band come across as a demonically possessed version of Dirty Three; which is to say that TToL sound very much like themselves. Post-rock and prog-metal have always been genres where its so very easy to make really naff missteps. In a most unlikely way TToL have done the opposite, slowly shedding anything unnecessary and hardening into something stylistically formidable, utterly impregnable. We’re at a musical moment where genre-leaping heavy bands like Deafheaven are critical darlings, an auspicious time for a record like No Tether. I’d go further and say, this crushing monolith will still stand tall in twenty years, fads be damned.
- Chris Cobcroft.