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Bass Communion, "Pacific Codex"
On this album, Steven Wilson uses sounds made from Steve Hubback's metal sculptures to make underwater music. Presented in a lavish package that includes a DVD-Audio disc along with a standard CD, a perfect-bound book with photographs, and a sturdy slipcase, it's without a doubt a beautiful artifact. It is a shame, then, that these two tracks don't quite live up to their presentation.
The aquatic theme likely would have been obvious even without the title or the book of oceanic photographs that's included. Both of the 20-minute tracks ebb and flow with chasms of reverberating metal that give an incredible sense of space, constantly evoking the feeling of submersion. They stretch time with their languid pace and use silence to suspend it altogether.
Even so, these tracks are far more static than such a theme would indicate. Too frequently, they stagnate rather than evolve. Rather than gaining in strength as they progress and building toward some awestruck peak, they recycle the same sounds and present them in more or the less the same fashion every time they appear. There are a few stretches where it seems like things are about to change and go somewhere different, but these moments disappear before they can be truly effective. The physicality of these tracks is indeed impressive, but too often it's at the expense of substance.
The DVD-Audio disc with its 5.1 mix is obviously the best way to hear this album because of its ability to hold more information than a conventional CD, but more could have been done to enrich the overall experience. While including a gallery of eight photographs as a feature on the DVD, it seems a bit of a wasted opportunity to include only still-life photography when seeing them come alive as moving imagery would have been a thrilling option. As it stands, the DVD's photos reveal little more than what's already detailed in the accompanying booklet.
Pacific Codex overwhelms subwoofers and rattles windows as expected, but it never quite takes listeners anywhere new. While it has plenty of low-end depth, the lack of development prevents it from being the sonic immersion it could have been. As such, it's a good album but not a great one.
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