Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Blindead
Label: Mystic Production
Released: 2010
Length: 46:10
Rating: 4.5/5
After diving deep into the latest album by the Polish band Blindead, Absence, it becomes clear these guys are anything but superficial, half-baked or run-of-the-mill, so it was only logical that the trail led backwards to the original sin, the band’s holy grail, their point of creative explosion, after which nothing could ever be the same as before the moment of birth, of creation. You can find it as far back as 2010, in the form of an incredibly complex, progressive and dark gem called Affliction XXIX II MXMVI, which, for its play with lyrical messages and an almost symphonically distorted interplay of rhythms and melodies, draws on the soul-deep pain and ominous weight of the rejection of an autistic child, a misunderstood psychiatric patient, an exile from a world of rational, shallow people who can’t accept difference. Loneliness, other ways of grasping reality, unusual readings of perception, the symptomatic closing of doors and windows to the world so you can be alone with yourself, with your thoughts, your mental calculations, with messages you can’t share with the world – that’s the stuff Blindead slide down the toboggan of empathy with, straight into the dark world of a young girl branded by autism. And the message is already there in the track titles. Self-consciousness Is Desire And After 38 Weeks My New Playground Became Dark And Gray, So It Feels Like Misunderstanding When All My Hopes And Dreams Turn Into Affliction. That message promises a heavy, massive confrontation with darkness and pain, a kaleidoscopic string of images woven under a refined dramaturgical baton, putting the Poles on the same level as the better-known masters Neurosis, Isis, Pelican or Rosetta. Following in the footsteps of the genre’s giants demands perfection from creators and followers alike, and Affliction XXIX II MXMVI sows the seeds of perfect dynamics, sludgy progressive music from the very first bar onwards.
Self-consciousness Is Desire: self-awareness is a goal the album’s anti-heroine will never be able to reach. After an ambient intro that opens the door to the protagonist’s mental underworld, an exorcistic, cleansing dance kicks off, where guitars with the sensuality of Porcupine Tree get smeared with the dirty shades of Opeth’s brutal meter. The sonic textures are multiple, the sound dense and darkly impenetrable. Over a mass of guitars, bass, rhythmically reinforced soundscapes and drum build-ups, Patryk Zwolinski’s outstanding vocals weave the whole thing together, shifting already in the very first image, the first fresco and reflection of darkness, subtly from softness into the searing brutality of a fully painful fusion with the message of the lyrics. The complexity of existing and being aware, and on the other side the miracle of birth, after which doors of awareness and the construction of reality swing open in a growing individual, while on the canvas of personal consciousness the determinants of time, space and materiality itself get built up too, once you’ve tasted life. Vague images of dreams, longing and existential bareness seep in between cold rationalization and the grasp of reality, and Blindead paint it with thick layers of post-rock math, repeating riffs and strong ambient additions of well-thought-out electronics, while expressive, anxious vocal outbursts are followed by more hypnotically anxious layers of merging fractals of rhythm and melody. The eclectic flight into spheres of cold chaos and pain continues with After 38 Weeks. Patryk’s vocals, much softer and almost dreamy this time, in a narrative, calmer storytelling parable over layered guitars, drums and the sounds of a suggestive, minimalist trumpet, keep unfolding the perceptual spectrum of the album’s central heroine. The metallic aftertaste of an existence robbed of all fullness shows itself less in the sound of the whole than in the deep introspection of the lyrics. »Muted, distant, unrecognizable sounds… / The city, the people, the kitchen, the bathroom, / Places I managed to recognize / After several days / But not by smell / I can’t smell anything / It feels like I’m not breathing / My sense of taste also ruthlessly vanished somewhere / The last thing I had in my mouth left a metallic aftertaste / But it was ages ago / I see nothing / Gravity is nonexistent / Where the hell am I? / Impulse how did it happen? / Nothingness / Why can’t I remember who I am, what I am? / After a minute I realize I don’t remember anything / What was yesterday, what’s today? / I’m suspended in a smudgy, fuzzy, vague, obstinate nothingness / I’m swallowed, my world shrinked / And keeps getting smaller like it’s trying to devour me / Then again I have a strong sense of assured safety …« The album reads and unfolds as a truly dramaturgically deep tangle of life’s drama, a musically expressive genius that doesn’t serve up choruses for the simple-minded listener who wants things easy, and its out-of-this-world gloomy aestheticism simply leads you onward on its own, by the sheer suggestive magnetism of suspense, without ever leaving you with a sense of bitterness or anything missing. My New Playground Became stirs up more eruptive emotions again. This time, wanting contact and to be heard, the girl squeezes screams of pain, growing rage and a destructive urge to wipe out her limitations and boundaries out of her emotional cocoon, the vacuum of her mental universe, so she can pour fully into the world around her. The turbulent order of chaos and the math of pure lucidity in the sonic contours peak here, and after a seamless, well-conceived flow into the more Pink Floyd-ish Dark And Gray, following a cosmic breakdown and the static dying-out of the violent craving to speak, the story unfolds again a bit more ominously muted, yet still set up to stir the spirit of those following the parable. Tool-like whispers of static and the ever-present countdown of time with calm drums, while the sound of a concert piano scratches its way through the whole thing, along with the impressive metamorphoses of the band’s frontman. Next comes the more contemplative, meditative mental jazz of the second-to-last track, All My Hopes And Dreams Turn Into. The protagonist’s wish to travel through space and time backwards too hints that, once that wish came true, she would cancel herself out, break the cycles of repeating depression of an incomplete existence and the pain of never realizing herself. The more expressive closing of the album, Affliction XXVII II MMIX, starts its narrative roughly where you’d expect it from the dramatic structure. The symbolic oneness, the centrality of the number one, focuses the scattered images of unfinished sentences into the figure of a lonely god, creator of reality, bearer of the solipsistic grotesqueness of existence and of constructing reality, in the form of a girl. Without needless clichés, and without adding to the album’s complex structure any simplified, slogan-like escape into the safer waters of rhyming doggerel, it flows into a grand, pompous postmodern musical finale, which gives no final answers but leaves a hunch of the ominous closure of the story you’ve been following.
This mosaic of shattered fragments breaks the rules of the hit-recipe of verses and choruses deliberately and with total consistency. Ignoring the rules of the craft, the album is more like a carving, a huge watercolor of life, an infernal symphony of complete emotional deficit that never runs out of emotions or of its color palette of expressive might. The neurotic beauty of total hypnotic pain and emptying brings to mind the bloody watercolors of Neurosis on Through Silver In Blood, only here there’s way more post-rock polish, more minimalism, and a touch more prominent production. Within the chaos of emotions there’s a hidden order, a hidden math, and cold rationality gives way to pure emotion this time. On the album Aflliction, Blindead reached a state of perfect post-rock zen, a perfect resonant merging with the cathartic annihilation in the name of expressing perfect beauty. The spherical quality of this multiple musical genius doesn’t show up as individuals dominating the whole, but as the whole overpowering the ego of the individual. Blindead work as a coherent whole, and it’s the message of the full set of compositions that matters more than any single track. This isn’t aesthetic self-indulgence or an artistic monologue with a world that has no soul able to grasp the message, but a deep discourse on pain, on the essence of being, on the math of the integrals of the rational shaking hands with the irrationality beneath the surface of the divinity of the One. The album is a novelistic excursion into the spheres of the untouchability of the dysfunctional, which in the end gives it a deeper philosophical meaning and turns it into a tool for awakening and further interpreting the listener’s own sense of meaning, while the listener becomes the canvas on which the individual layers stick together into a mightier scream, Edvard Munch-style. And here, with a touch of tearjerking metaphysics, we step onto a field where only the boldest and bravest tread. For being heard, felt and understood, all we can do is congratulate the young Poles and wish for many more such excursions into the dangerous waters of the unknown.
Lineup
Bartosz Hervy – keyboards, electronics, effects
Konrad Ciesielski – drums and percussion
Mateusz Smierzchalski – bass, guitar
Marek Zielinski – guitar, ambient textures
Patryk Zwolinski – vocals
Piotr Kawaleprowski – bass
Guest musicians:
Maciek Lubieniecki – trumpet
Bartek Reszetar – double bass
Pavel ‘Smaga’ Smakulski – keyboards, piano
Noise Collector, Miastodzwiekow, Morgantii, Rfhache, Robinhood76, Tomlija – samples
Production
Kuba Mankowski, Mateusz Smierzchalski & Bartosz Hervy
Tracklist
1. Self-consciousness Is Desire And
2. After 38 Weeks
3. My New Playground Became
4. Dark And Gray
5. So It Feels Like Misunderstanding When
6. All My Hopes And Dreams Turn Into
7. Affliction XXVII II MMIX
