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Nadja & Black Boned Angel
This release collects two songs from a 2007 collaboration between two of the most prolific and unique artists to emerge from the doom metal milieu. That union, needless to say, held (and holds) enormous potential. While this is not the absolute monster of an album that I had hoped it would be, many flashes of brilliance and inspiration still manage to burst through the slow-motion, shambling doomfest that resulted.
This project, originally conceived by Aidan Baker and 20 Buck Spin, is an undeniably excellent idea: both artists’ aesthetics seem like they could be complementary in a way that would yield far more than the mere sum of their parts. While I like Nadja’s heavily processed shoegazer doom quite a bit sometimes, I often feel that it could benefit from a healthy infusion of rawness and unpredictability. Campbell Kneale, conversely, is often so intense and harrowing that it is difficult to listen to his work twice. My hope was that Nadja’s dense wall of doom would present Kneale’s blood-splattered guitar maiming in a more melodic and listenable (but still scary and uncompromising) way than I am accustomed to. That is not quite what happened, but the results are often compelling nonetheless.
This album consists of two lengthy instrumentals (both are over 20 minutes). Notably, a third track (with vocals) was recorded at the same time (“Christ Send Light”) and it sounds a hell of a lot like Jesu. That song was wisely released separately, as it would have been jarringly out of place here amidst all the amelodic hellish roaring. I’m curious about which direction this project went in first, but I could not locate a chronology anywhere.
“I” slowly fades in with a clean, chorused, and rather somber guitar motif over a bed of slowly intensifying distortion. Finally, nearly seven minutes later, the volume erupts and the drums kick in, yet the riff does not change. While undeniably heavy, dense, and texturally impressive, it never catches fire due to the numbing repetition and plodding, uninspired drums. Thankfully, both the riff and the pedestrian drumming vanish around the 10-minute mark and give way to a nightmarishly gnarled and snarling guitar maelstrom that persists until the song ends. No one does oppressive, grinding, pseudo-industrial chaos quite like Campbell Kneale, and this particular example is nicely enhanced by fleeting glimpses of backwards drums and indistinct melodic fragments that are vainly struggling to avoid being consumed by the black hole around them.
“II” segues from that fading entropy with an ominous, throbbing low-end drone and quavering feedback. Gradually, it coheres into a lurching, elephantine dirge of slow motion drums and impossibly dense power chords coupled with Baker’s floating, hazy atmospherics. The main riff changes slightly after a while but the actual notes being played are essentially irrelevant: all pretensions of melodicism, variety, and song-craft are sacrificed at the altar of sheer, crushing density and hypnotic, endless repetition. While mining roughly the same stylistic vein as the previous track, “II” is much more successful, largely because the transitions betweens parts are seamless and no attempt at all is made to be anything other than a deafening, all-consuming juggernaut.
Essentially, Baker and Kneale have created an intensely heavy, but somewhat bloated and unfocused album. I suspect a more organic and mutually inspiring collaboration was impossible under the circumstances of the time: the two bands did not play together and the whole album was constructed by passing sound files back and forth between Canada and New Zealand. I hope that another collaboration is in the works: while not transcending either band’s solo work, this experiment hints that far greater things are possible.
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