Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Intronaut
Label: Century Media
Release: 2010
Duration: 53:49
Rating: 4.7/5
Titans of progressive twists, sludge-metal beauty refined with experimental approaches to the material, and pure devotion to an introspective pilgrimage into the very core of the soul – that and more is Intronaut. Calling it post metal and slapping every possible label on it only dulls the ecstasy that hits you the instant you step into the wonderfully airy album Valley Of Smoke. My ears pricked up at the mere mention of the outstanding Mastodon as a reference, and the knockout blow of total surrender came when the name Justin Chancellor turned up among the album’s guests, a key architect of the monumental grandeur of Tool’s sound.
And after the first listen it becomes clear that Intronaut are closer to the former, and maybe to Mastodon’s current softened form on Crack The Skye, than to a raging beast with stiff moves. After the albums Void and Prehistoricism, it’s time for a tip of the hat to modern, subtle forms and for weaving the story of Los Angeles into the core of their latest epic journey toward a hidden inner center. So let’s get into the substance. It’s rich and varied. The album opens with a brutal metal slice and broken rhythms in the opening track Elegy, which sings of an event from 1998. That September, construction workers at a local refinery uncovered the 200-year-old remains of a Native American burial ground, where 50 members of the Gabrielino tribe were buried – among them two barely born children. All of them had died violent deaths, and the bones bore traces of unimaginable brutality, which this time couldn’t be pinned directly on the heavy hand of Spanish Christianization. The frenzied yet impenetrable rhythm patterns of bassist Joe Lester and drummer Danny Walker weave a dense veil. The guitar-and-vocal duo of Sacha Dunable and David Timuick keeps cranking up the tension. “We lay undeneath you / Obscured by centuries / And cry in horror …” Much is left unsaid, only hinted at, like the soft frame of a corpse that reminds and warns of transience, and out of this story soft layers of ever less tormenting dreams are woven. The unraveling continues with Above, which builds on the illusion of a hostile attack and early psychosis after America’s entry into the slaughter of World War II. On the night of February 24-25, 1942, LA’s anti-aircraft defenses sounded the alarm and started pounding invisible planes in the sky, damaging a couple of buildings; in this “friendly fire” three civilians lost their lives and three more died of heart attacks. As was speculated later, the army might have been firing at unidentified flying objects that night, which it afterwards tried to chalk up to jangled nerves and weather balloons. The track Miasma is dedicated to the city’s corrupt authorities and to politics in general, and after almost eight minutes of ambient barreling down the rotten backroads of the California metropolis, the reckoning with the rotten sections of our everyday society once again turns to digging through the bloody past of Los Angeles. This time the time machine, in the track Sunderance, takes you back to when the newly arrived Spanish conquistadors were “discovering” these parts, bringing the seed of discord and class division into an area rich with native Indian customs, culture and history. Core Relations drifts back into the realm of fantasy and the myth of a race of people who worshipped lizards over 5000 years ago and who supposedly built huge underground cities beneath the Pacific coast. One of them was supposedly built directly under Los Angeles. In 1934 the mining engineer Warren Shufeld also devoted himself to the search for this lost world; by his account, the city on which Los Angeles was founded was shaped like a lizard, stretching from the Dodgers’ stadium all the way to the central library. What’s almost unbelievable is that this advanced civilization supposedly carved its underground tunnels with the help of chemistry, and met its end and final fade into the mists of mystery because of a meteorite impact – or, according to other guesses, a fire destroyed them. The cataclysm and great catastrophe supposedly wiped out every trace of their existence from the surface, so the answers had to be sought deep beneath the earth’s crust. The notorious, self-proclaimed archaeologist grandly announced that the remains of the city, with its tunnels and treasury, lay beneath Fort Moore Hill; when the big investment came to a sorry end in an archaeological fiasco at that location, Shufeld vanished into obscurity. Just before the drilling at Fort Moore Hill, a clairvoyant from Pico Rivera, Edith Elden Robinson, had reported a vision of an enormous city and gigantic tunnels stretching all the way to the coast. Intronaut weave this controversial and enigmatic story into the fabric of their album, and in the layers of earth and soil where the “lizard people” supposedly carved out their home and grave, the fury of nature grows ever louder. As for earthquakes and tectonic shifts – after Tool, who on Aenima sang of a vision of the cataclysmic end of this part of the continent – Intronaut chronicle them more lucidly and more firmly tied to reality on the track Below. Centuries of shifting ground, including the 1994 earthquake in Nortridge, are just part of the mosaic that makes up the basic narrative layers of the record Valley Of Smoke. And speaking of smoke and a valley of mists and smoke – the album’s title track Valley Of Smoke is an instrumental ode to the cannabis high that some find so essential and indispensable. How you gaze through the thick, greasy weed smoke at the neon lights of L.A., that city of pleasure, debauchery, false idols and illusory phantoms, is also hinted at by the collaboration with Justin Chancellor. Two drummers and two bassists plus two guitars – the total is truly gigantic: in sound and in headcount … The ecstasy of rhythm and melody is also a fitting spot to say a word or two about the organic bond between the musicians in the organism called intronaut. The guitar excursions of Sacha Dunable and David Timnick range from hard metal crunch and ambient play with effects to intuitive painting with a brush of jazzy precision. A superb meeting of the violent and the soft is woven and rubbed into the pores of the whole thing across the entire album, and the dichotomy of seeming opposites is not one bit too heavy, taxing or distracting. Joe Lester’s bass lines are fat and downright unbelievably playful, reminiscent in places of Jaco Pastorius. Drummer Danny Walker doesn’t lag an inch behind, squeezing a glamorous itinerary of sounds out of palettes of rhythm and obedient drum skins. I’d also single out the vocal duo, locked in a cathartic duel between guttural screaming and soft contours, with a lyrical haiku minimalism that recalls the manner we know so well from Troy Sanders of the epic Mastodon. Toward the end of the record, one more lyrical gem stands out. The chronicle of the past opens up fully in the track Past Tense, about the remnants of a Nazi commune from the 1930s; Murphy Ranch, next to their Brentwood neighborhood, loses its role as a Nazi refuge when the US enters the slaughter of World War II. The story of the foiled plans of the Nazi spy Herr Schmidt, the naive married couple Mrs. Winona and Mr. Norman Stephens, and the dissolved Nazi utopia is told almost telegraphically.
Words are only anchor points – what matters most is the music. Sacha Dunable has also spoken about the extraordinary effort from which something exceptional and visionary was born for the ever more frequently cited genre of post metal. The sweat and toil paid off with a complete, polished sonic picture of this musical almanac of the place where intronaut were born and fully grew up. The superb production was once again entrusted to Josh Newell, who already squeezed the best and juiciest out of Jane’s Addiction. A synergy of lucky coincidences and above all pure, distilled inspiration pours out in an etching of the purest music. If the comparison with Tool and Rush is perhaps overblown, the package you get here is at least worth coming back to for repeat checks. Valley Of Smoke probably won’t please the brutality seekers, but it’ll be a big, nice plaster on the wounds of those who’ve feasted their ears to death on old Mastodon and Tool releases and can’t count on new ones for a while … Valley Of Smoke is, if not original, then at least a worthy attempt at your complete satisfaction.
Line-up
Sacha Dunable – guitar, vocals
Dave Timnick – guitar, vocals
Danny Walker – drums
Joe Lester – bass
guest musicians:
Justin Chancellor – bass (on Valley Of Smoke)
Production
Josh Newell
Track list
1. Elegy
2. Above
3. Miasma
4. Sunderance
5. Core Relations
6. Below
7. Valley of Smoke
8. Past Tense
9. Vernon (bonus)
