You know, I consider
myself pretty open-minded when it comes to outré metal subgenres,
but when the crunchy leaves/footsteps/pebbles/sticks and bells segue
into chirps, playground singing and flutes one does wonder exactly
what Aastral Projections' envisioned
target audience is
and whether
this deranged fever dream doesn't just
put them at the risk of going permanently over the edge.
Aastyra,
a side project from one of
the Canadians
behind Prophecy-signed act
Finnr's Cane, is a bit of an enigma. One part high-speed
computerized symphonic black
metal á la Limbonic Art, one part Coil-esque sound
collages, some early
Tangerine Dream cosmic meandering
– and yeah, I'm sure we can fit those high-octane
retro synth soundtracks in somewhere as well, bring it on.
Oh, and let's keep it wholly
instrumental, except for the parts where
ethereal female
crooning comes
floating through.
I don't want to do a
track-by-track description, but Aastyra's constant genre-hopping
antics more or less force my hand.
Aastral
Projections is kicked off by
a short, abstract
soundscape featuring
industrial
clanging and blaring that might as well have fallen out of Nurse With
Wound's, uh, wound, before the listener is run
over by “Interstellar Death Race” – which
title, you'll find out, really
says everything about both this
song and the only
two other
tracks
that are unambiguously metal: although saccharinely
synth-dominated – and gloriously so, repetitive
but
fluid melodies bleeping and blooping their way up and down
the cosmic canvas while guitars, almost trumpet-like by
virtue of
their braaap-y
texture,
pump the song forward with
one-note riffs
– it's
lightning-fast, features machine-gun percussion
and even
though its cheese requires some suspension of disbelief, it's worth
your while. With regards to the other two BM songs, “Xenopia”
keeps the synth-monsoon but allows the guitars a tad more freedom and
dynamics, while the vicious “The Mechanical Womb” relegates the
electronics to the role of background ambience to make
space for Thorns-style industrial savagery – complete with
apathetic mantras and the only occurence of harsh vocals on
the album.
But
that's only the
sane side of Aastral Projections.
After “Interstellar Death Race”'s sci-fi mayhem, we get “Terra”,
which I alluded to in the first paragraph: is this muzak for
schizophrenics? The heavily jingle-and-loop-dependant structure of
the song contrasts starkly with the sylvan scene it's supposed to
represent, and brings to mind
images of the internet in its puberty, trying to simulate a glade, or
something. It's without a doubt the most unique track on the album,
but its random nature and tonal awkwardness detracts
from its replay value, and after the initial novelty has worn off I
can only see
it remaining
interesting as an ASMR-track, not
as a song. Following
“Terra”, “Of Spirit And Captivity” takes things back to
relative although unimpressive normalcy by presenting the listener
with three
mournful
minutes of ghostly,
reverberating wailing,
which, while rather dragging
(and that at only 3 minutes' length), does set the scene for
“Wanderer Of The Postapocalypse” – a pensive, synth-driven
ambient piece moving forward
at a glacial pace, evoking images of abandoned space stations and
distant nebulae. Over the
course of nearly ten minutes (the longest running time of any track
on Aastral Projections),
it gets reinforced by the
sighs encountered in the previous song – not nearly as irritating
this time around – until, just after the halfway mark, it gets
propulsed
into a shimmering rhythm, as
if the vessel's systems
suddenly start flickering
into activity again. By the
end of the song, everything's online and whirring, and
the whole thing just sounds cohesive and cathartic and cool.
The most intricate and succesful ambient piece of the album, no
doubt.
“Adversary”, then, matches predecessor “Xenopia”'s thrill and
pace, but channels this through fast-paced
synthwave/electro/whatever, not unlike the French Perturbator –
which project, coincidentally, also enjoys quite some popularity
amongst the metal crowd. It's well-written, contains lots of little
details and, weird piano-loop outro notwithstanding, it succeeds in
its retro ambitions. Finishing the album is “Shadowmirror”; a
moody synth-fest recalling cosmic carnival tunes (what else did you
expect, with such a cheerful title) where some guitars might
lie buried beneath the waves of fuzz, but I honestly can't tell.
So,
does Aastral Projections
work? A comparison to Thy
Catafalque – the closest project
Aastyra has to a genre-mate
– reveals that the album
lacks flow: the description should already have made this obvious,
but there is next to no continuity
in the songs' transitions, which the extreme diversity certainly
could have made use of. Many
songs on the album also exhibit the curiously contradictory double
defiency
of both being overly repetitive and
causing a sensory overload due to the sheer amount of impulses
at any given second, both of
which result
in headaches. Everything sounds inspired and fresh, to a certain
degree; the metal parts are
accomplished, the synth
compositions are way above arbitrary black metal interlude quality,
and there's undeniably a sense of purpose to all of this – the
problem being that this purpose has
no regard for the listener – but
in the end I'm quite ambiguous in my feeings towards Aastral
Projections. Give it a listen
for novelty's sake if nothing else and, if you're a fan of any of the
bands mentioned, maybe you'll find something to like here as well.
Just
keep some aspirin handy.
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