Neurosis – Honor Found In Decay (Neurot Recordings)
“To erase decay or consciousness of decay, decline, entropy, and ruin is to erase the understanding of the unfolding relation between all things, of darkness to light, of age to youth, of fall to rise. Rise and fall go together, they presume each other.” --Rebecca Solnit, The Ruins Of Memory
There is, sometimes fortunately and sometimes otherwise, no shortage of music out there. The notes wash over the receptive in torrents until the senses are dull from the classifying and qualifying. It can be difficult to stay adrift in the deluge. But there are the occasional pieces of aesthetic driftwood to which we can cling, shards of stability in a churning maelstrom of sameness. More than mere palate-cleansers, these are faith-restorers, deeply spiritual works in a manner that transcends that which is usually denoted when terms like “deeply spiritual” are thrown around. If pressed to name such an entity, it's exceedingly likely that the first name to come to my mind would be Neurosis. For a quarter-century, they've been a model of forward momentum, with their initial disparate influences congealing into something so distinct as to stand virtually peerless, their albums a succesion of monumental displays of texture and mood, none so similar to its predecessor that the band could be accused of stasis, none so radically altered that they would alienate anybody with whom the work previously resonated.
Honor Found In Decay, the band's first release in a half-decade, could be taken as the purest distillation of their aesthetic to date (though, to be fair, the same could be said of almost any Neurosis album at the time of its release – a testament to their scrupulous devotion to a constant repositioning of direction), a sustained meditation on light and shade that bears no substantial resemblance to anything other than the band's antecedent work. (To be fair, there are similarities to other artists, from Townes Van Zandt to Popol Vuh to Amebix, but these tend to be more spiritual and conceptual affinities than sonic semblances.) Expansive and lush, yet stark and harrowing, the album operates like a Bela Tarr film or a Francis Bacon painting, eschewing the predictable and the easily palatable for something far more unsettling and rewarding.
It's difficult to point to a single element that characterizes Honor. The instruments work more in tandem than on previous albums, sounding almost elemental, less like the guitar riffs or keyboard textures that characterized earlier work than a thunderous torrent of sound, singular in intent though not necessarily in approach. The songs are no less memorable for this, however, and rather than becoming ensnared by conventional structure (not that Neurosis ever relied too heavily on conventional structure), each flows effortlessly, with the sonic peaks and valleys overarched with a mood so unifying in its density that the disparity between the crushing dirge and the lithe melody aren't as stark as they might have been in less capable hands. However, Noah Landis' keyboards and samples could prove the exception. While they certainly act as the subtle glue that holds much of the material together, always present but rarely noticeable, there are moments - the violin samples that conclude the opening and closing songs, the ominous pulse that leands into “Bleed The Pigs,” or the strange microtonal melodies that emerge halfway through“My Heart For Deliverance,” for instance - where these subtle flourishes help transform the material into something devastating on multiple levels, not simply heavy but nuanced.
It seems appropriate that one of the album's few moments that could be considered a hook is the quasi-refrain of “At The Well” - the repeated line “in a shadow world” - because, just as the music exists in the twilight between the brutal and the ethereal, the lyrics and concepts dwell in the gray area between the interdependent foces of creation and destruction. That the first line of the opening song is “I walk into the water to wash the blood from my feet” is telling in this regard, suggesting both turmoil and violence alongside, and inherent to, some form of forward momentum. Other lines like “cracking the bones to get at the marrow” or “smoke from a gaping wound” work toward the same end, intertwining visceral imagery with suggestions of survival, escape, and growth. But while the lyrics both imply evolution and expound upon the titular decay, the two are never presented as autonomous concepts. Instead there's something of a visionary quality to the imagery, one in which the mystery to be found in such dualities is embraced as paramount, even a path to transcendence. This is suggested by the brief spoken monologue in “My Heart For Deliverance,” in which a female narrator quietly intones “we follow the earth, the earth follows the stars, the stars know their way, and though the body dies, the stars will reign like the waves of the sea and the breathless wind,” before the music explodes like a star going nova, with the rapid uptick in intensity acting as a sort of microcosmic vision of the album's conceptual orientation.
Despite the previous paragraphs, even trying to analyze a Neurosis album often feels like trying to quantify continental drift. A term like “timeless” gets tossed around so much as to be stripped of the magnificence it suggests, but Neurosis' music, despite the modern instrumentation, often seems outside of the temporal. It's not difficult to imagine the band's members, had they all been born in a different age, as the sculptors of Stonehenge or the excavators of the Nazca Lines. It may seem hyperbolic to place their music on such a level, but it functions with a purpose similar to the ceremonial constructs of antiquity, laying bare the artifice of the gaps commonly perceived to exist between the visceral and the mystical, the emotional and the intellectual. It's devastating material, humbling to behold yet imbued to its core with a beauty that's no less transcendent for its harshness.