If I’m not careful, writing a review of Beautiful Land is going to read like a thesaurus for the word “melancholy”. It is beautiful and disturbing fare, hinting at malevolence throughout. The pace rarely rises beyond the funereal and the mood never lifts. It took quite some listens to settle into the grey scale of the music given the unrelenting gloom of the post-Christmas drag. And Spring is a long way away, well it is for this album.
This cerebral and artistic album incorporates dolorous close harmonies, most notably on “A New Dawn” which has echoes of Pink Floyd wrapped in a scratchy wool blanket. It creates an epic, bleak landscape around which the music ebbs and flows. Elsewhere they are not afraid to experiment with discordant elements but not to the point that the result is unlistenable.
A quick google soon reveals that A Whisper In The Noise typically play with a backdrop of images which illustrate their themes, but the music automatically creates a cine-film in your head. “In Will”, with its plaintive distressed violin, evokes images of shuffling concentration camp inmates living in listless, skeletal purgatory, or sad, lonely old ladies waiting for the relative who never arrives.
The lyrics are deserving of mention, if only because I can’t think when I last heard the word “obsequious” woven so seamlessly into a song but maybe I’m only saying that because I needed to get the dictionary out for “acedia”. It would be ridiculous to imagine that these menacing songs could ever be accompanied by anything other than plaintive, aching words and they do not disappoint. The imagery of “Aramament” declares “I want all of this to be gone, I want all of this to die, I want hope to ring as virtue, not as final compromise” — fair makes you shudder, don’t it?
The instrumentation is non-conventional, with an orchestral flair. There are several layers of piano, violins, synths, guitars, percussion and voice effects, all nestled together. It is all put together so beautifully that it seems churlish to try to separate it into its constituent elements. I’ll leave that effort to the musos, for me its all about the way the sounds make me feel, and this music makes me feel languid and reflective, yet quietly, dangerously murderous. It’s not an immediate album, it takes effort to get your head around, but then it wriggles into your consciousness and lies across your discomfort like a warm, wet towel.
A Whisper In The Noise has managed to dig into the dark corners of my psyche and set it to music. I’m not sure that’s a good thing for anybody to understand.
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