REFLECTOR - pass
(CD/LP, Noise Appeal / Rock Is Hell)
There’s a kind of heavy, all over the world, tonight.
After a dozen years of honing its craft and skills Reflector, the
duo from Styria, should be ready now with “pass” to embrace the honors
and fame coming at them from the worldwide underground circles of fans of
heavy and extreme music. In other words, there are way too many trite and
boring guitar/drum duos out there playing slow and grinding doom, forever
lost in the repetition of the same old riff Kyuss reused way too often back
then already. What the world really needs is an original approach, skilled
and focused, that will fill the void between Sunn0))) and Om, and strike
towards the mass appeal of the Melvins at the same time. This, by way of chance
or forfeiture, is where fate has lead Reflector to come to. It should have
been there already with “Flugangst”, latest with the re-release of
“Flugangst” in 2007, but it is also a method of the duo to take their
time, obviously. If we can’t change, then we’ll have to wait until the
world has changed towards us.
Reduced to the max, they avoid all kinds of stale
waters and surprise the listener with the highest amount of changes in
riffage, tempo, pitch and approach since “Hooch”. But these changes are
not only stuck to each other in some kind of random fashion (remember John
Zorn’s mathematical approach to composition in Cobra and Naked City,
whoooo…) but they are more like tectonic shifts, that change the landscape
but always seem to have an organic basis to stand on. Then they suddenly
erupt or change completely. The first time everybody sees the Grand Canyon
they are surprised to remark that it is actually nothing but a gigantic
channel in an otherwise plain landscape. Easy to fall into, actually. A sort
of “whoops, there it is, wow” experience. The same here. A riff changes
and changes organically for some time, the listener gets used to this, and
then suddenly, the whole song breaks lose or changes tone or stops.
There is nothing safe with Reflector, no security
zones. If there is a message to this (mostly) instrumental slow speed
avalanche of heavy music, then it is this. If you get into the event horizon
of your stereo, then you are done in. The long and unbroken history of
musical partnership of the two minds behind Reflector of course helps in
finding their common target. They are now in a position where they can go
back to songs written in 1996 and make them sound fresh and new in 2009.
This one, “Booby Hatch” is also the first song with real vocals, verses
and lyrics for Reflector. (1996 is also the year The Melvins went to a major
label. Does that mean anything significant? Or is this kind of Melvinism
just an analogy to Dylanism in folk music?) But if “Booby Hatch” is the
obvious “hitsingle” (hah! To me it is “life set” because of the
hi-speed noise rock riff…) on this album, then it is back to destruction
of expectations with the next song and then onwards.
After all, Reflector are also able to tone down the
impact and find some smarter and more subtle ways to approach the listener.
I know that some people will only understand if you kick them in the teeth,
believe me, I had the idea often enough, but then violence is now answer (to
what question, anyway?). Or so they say. Sludge on the other hand, I
believe, probably is. But the main effect of Reflector’s new album seems
to be that after repeated listens you start to lose all your traditional
points of reference, disortientation sets in, you are left on a big, black
ocean with heavy waves crushing in on you. Better get used to it.
