AMS album of the week 20

Ensemble Pearl is a thoroughly dark album featuring some big names in modern avant-garde metal. Steve O’Malley of Sunn O))) is the best known, but two members of Boris, the Japanese noise rock band, are also present (drummer Atsuo and live guitarist Michio Kurihara). Former bassist of Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter, Bill Herzog, is the only musician that might seem out of place.

The four of them set out to make a careful masterpiece of ominous music like nothing they’ve written before. This is saying a lot, as O’Malley and Boris’ music has touched upon everything heavy and unholy. Ensemble Pearl is instead a collection of slow, doomy instrumentals, fleshed out with gloomy textures. Drums keep a steady dirge pace yet feel loose and improvisational. Melodies and riffs take minutes to play out and run their course through moods both dark and ambiguous. The mix never becomes muddied by an overdose of pedals or laptop effects. Dissonance is not constant, such that the listener is not exhausted by offensive sounds, but this does not stop Kurihara occasionally lashing out with incredibly loud, fuzzed guitar solos that the rest of the band are unshaken by.

Tracks average 8-10 minutes with the final chapter, “Sexy Angle”, playing for a monumental 20 minutes, climaxing in a solo at its 13th minute that could be mistaken for a small child, screaming. In the song’s quieter moments, an assortment of drones rise up from the background, and individual snares and toms are delayed separately from the rest of the drum kit, making the band feel like much more than four players.

Some of the album’s best parts are those where the atmosphere surfaces from its darkest moments. The best example of this is “Wray”, a beatless track focused on string drones and heavily sampled koto plucks, evoking a different, lighter mood, becoming almost ambient. A casual listener might fault the album on being too consistent, or simply be disappointed that the result isn’t “heavy” enough, given the talent present. It’s simply heavy in a different manner – a slow, suffocating manner, rather than the blistering noise that Boris and Sunn O))) have been treating our ears with for years. Ensemble Pearl highlights a progression from doom metal to something more mature and agonising.