 |
|
Natural Snow Buildings, "Terror's Horns"
After an unusually lengthy period of relative silence, Natural Snow Buildings have returned with a significant departure from much of their previous work.  Well, a departure in some ways, at least–both the songs and the entire album are unexpectedly brief and concise.  Also, the most memorable pieces eschew the duo's usual drone and "haunted folk" tendencies in favor of something resembling a lysergic, nightmarish Ennio Morricone score or an imaginary soundtrack to a Jodorowsky film.  Otherwise, everything great about the duo thankfully remains, as comparative accessibility has done nothing to lessen Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte’s characteristic spell of haunting and timeless otherworldliness.  This is definitely one of the more essential Natural Snow Buildings albums.
Terror’s Horns opens in striking and beautiful fashion, as "Dawn on a Buckskin" evocatively combines a mournful and reverberating Spaghetti Western tremolo-bar strum with massing dissonant drones and a slow-motion pulse of bass drum thud and crashing cymbals.  To some degree, the piece calls to mind the Wild West, but Natural Snow Buildings' version is quite a bit more strange and disturbing than any familiar images from movies.  To me, it creates a tableaux that is not so much "gunfight" or "ghost town" as "wounded person stumbling through an empty, flickering, unfamiliar, and hallucinatory landscape."  As far as opening salvos go, Mehdi and Solange could not have done better.  The following "Saturna’s Black Belt" is both equally short and similarly stellar, again embellishing the hollow twang of the Western with dirge-like, quasi-ritualistic percussion and an ominous miasma of buzzing and swirling drones.  Even better is the strangely sickly guitar tone of the central motif.  In a mere six minutes or so, Mehdi and Solange managed to plunge me deeply into a twisted, disturbing, forlorn, and temporally dislocated world of their own making.
Lamentably, the album is not able to endlessly sustain such a relentless pace of brilliance and innovation for its entire duration, but Terror's Horns does offer up at least two other gems, albeit in somewhat different directions.  The 10-minute epic "The King in Yellow" is partially a return to NSB's comfort zone, as it is quite long, prominently features Mehdi's floating and ghostly vocals, and gradually morphs into a fine drone piece.  There is a wonderful twist though, as Mehdi's vocals occur over a beautifully thorny and broken-sounding thicket of buzzing, stuttering, and stumbling strings.  Later, Mehdi and Solange unveil yet another triumph at the end of the album with "Orion is Dead," elevating their standard dirge-like balladry with eerie vocal harmonies and an explosive crescendo of smoldering distortion, trance-like percussion, and a blearily melodic quasi-orchestral fantasia.
The remaining four songs are generally quite good as well, but they will mostly sound quite familiar to anyone who already has a few Natural Snow Buildings albums.  "Twilight Bells, Terror's Horns," for example, is a bit of shimmering, twinkling, and undulating ambiance, embellished only by interruptions of deep, hollow moans resembling the shifting of a giant, empty ship’s hull.  Later, "People in the Hills" returns to similar territory, mingling buzzing and ominous drones with hollow wooden clacks; lazily jangling chimes; and wordless, spectral vocals.  "The Sun Tower" is a bit of an exception, however, as it unexpectedly transforms Mehdi's usual ghost-folk into something quite muscular and metallic with liberal use of distortion and a vigorous boom-boom-thwack percussion crescendo.  The lengthy "Rising Portal" is also a bit of an aberration, as its warm and radiant drones do not seem to belong on the same album as any of the disquieting surrounding pieces.  I suspect it was included because it has meaning within whatever overarching narrative arc the duo were hoping to weave with their sequencing.  In any case, it is a bit too pleasant and straightforward for my liking.  Curiously, Mehdi and Solange seem to be quite fond of that direction, as the limited edition version of Terror's Horns came with a second album (The Ladder) that leans very heavily in that vein.  Natural Snow Buildings admittedly do ambient drone quite well (they have a distinct knack for texture and layering), but there are too many other artists producing similar fare to make it as satisfying as something like "Dawn on a Buckskin."
As far as new Natural Snow Buildings albums go, I could not realistically have hoped for anything much better than Terror's Horns: it may not be perfect, but its high points are very high indeed.Also, I would have been perfectly content with yet another suite of songs that continue to improve upon past themes, so I am both delighted and surprised that Mehdi and Solange instead decided to both try something new stylistically and distill their oft-amorphous and overwhelming aesthetic into something a bit more manageable.  It is no small feat for a singular band to completely overhaul its sound without losing any of its distinctiveness.  As far as I am concerned, Terror's Horns is a hugely successful experiment, as half of its songs are absolutely revelatory.  The sole critique that I have (aside from both the length and inclusion of "Rising Portal") is that these shorter songs cannot weave quite the lushly mesmerizing and transformative illusion as some of the duo’s best long-form work.  That said, however, there is no real need to repeat what has already been done: the world already has many hours of great Natural Snow Buildings epics, so these shorter pieces are a welcome change of pace.  Anyone new to the band should definitely start here before plunging into the deep end.  Also, this is a great time for any existing fans numbed by the mountain of similar-sounding material to check back in.  This easily ranks among Natural Snow Buildings' finest work.
Samples:
 
