FALL TIME - coma

(CD, Fire Walk With Me)

I’ll admit that Fall Time really surprised me, and mostly because I definitely understimated them. I had them pegged as yet another local punk-band, but here they lay down a block of concrete and dense psychotic hardcore that is as big, black and solid as a mountain. Starting from the basic and well-worn formula that Neurosis laid down somewhere between their first two albums, they evolve their songs into epic monstrosities of darkness and destruction. I bet they prefer the early phase of Neurosis a lot to their later more esoteric and psychedelic (?) years. And right they are. I should have done a best records of all time a long ago for "Souls at zero", but as you know time time time takes its toll. With seven songs in one hour you will already know that this is not your standard hardcore fare of fast trashing through a dozen tracks to close the record in about 25 minutes. “coma” is a pounding, stomping beast of heavy guitar noise that stands tall as a monument and stretches its arm to crush the whole world.

Though inbetween they always seem to return to some of the more basic hardcore formulas, what they do in between the heavy chugging parts is just as interesting and able to give the songs more life and energy than if the were just long songs. Some bands play longish songs because they don’t know when to stop. 95 % of sludge and evil drone bands have their aching point right there. For the beastly heavy stomping routine that makes up the most intense parts of Fall Time’s songs, time and expansion is as necessary as the air to breath. When they repeat the same simple chord or riff pattern for a dozen times, the effect is one of being caught in the merciless wheel of a gigantic steamroller. This is also what The God Machine made so great in their best parts, though the melancholic meandering of Sophia easily makes that forget. This is the times when your pulse will start to move in the same slow motion as the beat on this record.

If the recording of the drum had been fuller and heavier, that pulse would have gained even more momentum. Most of the time it seems to be stuck too much in the back with too little focus on the deep frequencies of the bassdrum. This would have given the whole recording an extra part of kick. But maybe I am wrong, maybe any kind of kick further than the one apprehended would have been too much and would have tipped the whole thing over. Maybe what I percieved as a minutely wishy-washed production comes from the dense and descripted sound vision the band had set out to record. Well, if it is a 95 % there is no need to argue for scoring a 105, is there.

Other tactics of Fall Time include autumnal appreggios in more silent parts with atmospheric sounds in the back which come straight from the Metallica schoolbook in the edited version by early Paradise Lost, harsher and more distorted outbreaks of emotion and aggression (since aggression is not basically the same as an emotion due to its more active and passionate sides) and of course some droning noise parts. At the beginning of “The Kiwi experience” it is even some distorted pseudo churchorgan sounds. The heavy machinery stomping parts are the best, judged from a viewpoint purely interested in effect and effectivity. I don’t know who would be able to stand a full hour of this kind of relentless pounding on his / her ears and mind, so those varied and less intense parts come as a welcomed change in tone.

Despair, destruction and disillusionment come in a lot of ways. At one time it might be meeting the woman of your live at a funeral and then somehow finding yourself having killed her (“The Kiwi experience”), at another time it might be the terrorizing intimacy of someone you love (“vitamine”) and then again it might be in the mask of finding out that people you have trusted were not what you thought they were (“dead and buried #1”). These issues come in requiems and funeral songs, in the blues and in country music. Fall Time have taken on the most intense and energetic variety of musical expression of these ideas and they worked out their own proper version of it.