Pineal Gland Transmitting At Full Strength
There are countless
bands producing excellent albums, and countless more that can pride
themselves on having a strong, auctorial character, and it's at the
Venn intersection of these sets that a release can fulfill the
promise implied in its name by piercing through the veil of
musicality and dissolving into pure sonic transcendence. Once tuned
in to the frequency of such a band (my prime go-to example will
probably always remain The Angelic Process, but the French Murmuüre,
in all its polychromatic, ritualistic ecstasy, took a valiant stab at
that title in 2010), every first spin of an album becomes
subconsciously driven by the hope that, maybe, these guys too have
snuck in through that tear, or at least frayed open one adjacent to
it.
There are countless
bands producing excellent albums, and countless more that can pride
themselves on having a strong, auctorial character, and it's at the
Venn intersection of these sets that a release can fulfill the
promise implied in its name by piercing through the veil of
musicality and dissolving into pure sonic transcendence. Once tuned
in to the frequency of such a band (my prime go-to example will
probably always remain The Angelic Process, but the French Murmuüre,
in all its polychromatic, ritualistic ecstasy, took a valiant stab at
that title in 2010), every first spin of an album becomes
subconsciously driven by the hope that, maybe, these guys too have
snuck in through that tear, or at least frayed open one adjacent to
it.
So
when Yoga's Megafauna first cast its spell upon me, I thought
I'd struck upon the work of a spiritual acolyte of Murmuüre.
Something in the way the wispy, processed-beyond-recognizability
surrogate vocals – were they ever even vocals? – on opener
“Seventh Mind” are constantly pitch-shifting, or how you can't
tell whether they complement the guitar lines or whether it's the
other way around is just so incredibly reminiscent of the French
project that I was wholly incredulous and a tad peeved when I found
out Megafauna preceded it by a year.
Once
past the surface of that first song, however, the albums don't really
have all that much in common. Half of the songs on the album can be
categorized as a chaotic blend of the repetitive industrial noise
rock pioneered by Matthew Bower – keep eyes, ears and mind open for
Pure, Total and Skullflower – and traditional minimalistic black
metal, while the other half consists of short, soundtrack-ish ambient
pieces on which the guitars give way to diffuse keyboards and various
indeterminate atmospheric artifacts. The synths and the unceasing,
uncanny noise pervading the album are the key to Megafauna's
eerie charm: without these, the more rock-oriented songs like
“Encante” would have been a simple, unoriginal rehash of the
mid-paced black metal of the 90's – this in spite of its
fantastically hooky main riff, which Bergtatt-era Ulver would
have been jealous of. Yoga, however, clearly prioritize atmosphere
over song structure and masks it with a tumultuous cloud of blaring
chaos.
This
atmosphere is intrinsically tied to the release's larger concept
which – the absence of any intelligible lyrics notwithstanding –
rises to clarity through the song titles and paranormal cover art:
Megafauna is an auditive cabinet of curiosities, showcasing
both modern and ancient legends; from Icelandic elf-folk to
South-American shape-shifting dolphins and the Amerindian thunder
bird. Yoga succeed wonderfully in evoking a dense, swampy and
always-progressing murk which doesn't so much sound creepy as it does
enticing and mysterious, like some long-abandoned tropical shrine in
a mosquito-infested mangrove. Just go ahead and try “Fourth Eye”
– perhaps the strongest song on the album: as synth loops gurgle
upwards like bubbles in an overgrown bog, the triumphant guitars
create a spectral bridge to a hazy sun. As the song comes to its end,
the discerning listener can just make out flutes amidst a climax of
chanting voices and nondescript noise.
The
major weakness of Megafauna is how front-loaded it is, even
though it barely rounds forty minutes in length: after the
appropriately-titled “Treeman” – four trudging, doomy minutes
that shamble by in a positively zombie-like manner but make up one of
the less compelling and diverse songs on the album – we're left
with the weirdly medieval clarion-driven “Warrior”, the non-song
that is “Haunted Brain” and the morose “Chupacabra's Rotting
Flesh”, none of which can match the intensity of the previous
tracks. It is fitting, in a sense, that an album like this should
bleed out like it does…
If
we're judging Megafauna purely based on its ability to bring
urban legends and paranormal events to life, it still loses out to
Megaptera's The Curse of the Scarecrow or Alpha Drone's unsung
self-titled masterpiece, but looking at the first half of the album
by itself Megafauna's excellence is undeniable; it's one of
those albums which sound is uncommon and virtuous enough to survive
not being wholly consistent – and as long as Murmuüre stay
dormant, beggars can't be choosers.
80%
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