Death, grief and frazzled nerves conspire on an epic odyssey to the dark side
Totnes experimentalists Abrasive Trees have long sailed choppy liminal seas between the living world and whatever lurks beyond it. Their debut studio LP Light Remaining, released via Argonauta Records, is a dark and sombre affair: a bone-rattling necro-odyssey over the edge of the world. Delirious, deftly executed and magnificently moody.
Opener ‘No Solace’ sets the tone handsomely, its spartan bassline creeping furtively in the undercroft of singer Matthew Rochford’s spoken-word incantation. “Ordinary life is impossible / Nirvana is possible” feels like the album’s thesis statement writ large, Rochford’s voice landing it with all the deadpan weight of a gravestone engraving.
On ‘Star Sapphire’, Jay Newton’s diamond-bright guitar trails synaesthetic spiderweb melodies. ‘Tao To Earth’ overlays muscular riffs and Will Tyler’s hard-driving stickwork with a wry paean to the solace of stoicism: God, or something very much like it, entreating us to “try harder to bear” the world around us, its folly and injustice.
Between such epic peaks of pure sound energy, Light Remaining somehow finds space for quieter valleys of almost-playfulness, the macabre waltz of ‘Flickering Flame’ a case in point. Until it kicks in, that is, with backing vocals that seem to reverberate back along the tunnel you approach on your deathbed.
Make no mistake, the keynote is dread. ‘Carved Skull’ is a memento mori rendered for an age of cynical division and mass-market gaslighting. A bitter riff on the axiom that all civilisations eventually write their own eulogy.
Rochford’s background in Tai Chi and his Totnes home creep in here and there, not least in the Eastern-tinged drone that opens ‘I Didn’t Mean To Hurt You’. But it’s never long before the band returns to its default configuration: a surging, seething engine of doom. It’s an exhilarating ride, never more so than on bonus track ‘Megadrone’, which begins as a hymn to self-interest before systematically tearing its own argument to shreds.
For all its bleak soliloquies and heavy trapdoors, Light Remaining is no facile gothic potboiler. It has a point. A thesis. We acknowledge that the world is imperfect. We embrace the wisdom of coming to an accommodation. And we howl, and thrash, until our fingers bleed and our throats are raw.
Satisfyingly sinister, uncannily uplifting.
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