A song or a band sounds different at first compared to later, it’s the evolution of listener perception. Pure hostility and anger becomes in metal (or in any dark and heavy music for that matter) after getting used to it not anger anymore, the distortion of voices and guitars no longer an ax falling or a fist flying, but more like pure wonder at a gentle and awesome (in the true sense of the word awesome, not the valley girl sense) sunset, canyon, glacier, etc. Mouth of the Architect provides such suns, skies, mountains and oceans with their uncountable layers of fuzzed guitar-scapes, bass lines, drum trances and howls in their upcoming album (appropriately titled “Dawning”) due out June 25th on Translation Loss Records. It is atmospheric metal, post-metal, psych-doom and all sorts of other combinations of amorphous sub-categories. I think the album can be used to help wake up and get ready for action as well as work as something hypnotic to fall asleep to. That’s a duality very few artists achieve.
Voice clips, sound effects, Brian Eno ambiance, and layers and layers of fuzz and noise dominate and overwhelm throughout. Never spiky, crackly distortion on the guitars, they are always blending liquidly and effortlessly within the mix, like electric didgeridoos. The album’s full of tritones, skulls and bones and drones, like trudging through the dark woods of Bastogne all alone with a groan. It gestures toward classical, when the band all hits on one note I can’t help but picture an orchestra smacking a pressure point in a fiery minor key Beethoven piece or something.
Back to the evolution of perception thing. I don’t like guttural growling but after some time this band made me think of chanting monks as well as drunken headbangers, so I like growling more now. The musicians are metronomic robot men, the guitars, basses, drums and shredded throat pipes are so surgically precise and bludgeoningly relentless they kind of stop sounding like people after a while.
“Dawning” is a cool combination of slow and heavy, drawn out and immediate. Interestingly the songs are hardly ever really building up, just kind of already there at the top of the heaviness mountain. Synthesizer, organ, more vocal samples, faraway echoes, tribal ceremony drums and wahwah guitar keep it all nice and chaotic and full of ear candy.
“Patterns” is a standout track. The song shows they are very competent as a clean-toned metal band. The vocal harmonies remind me of Alice in Chains but in a new, more complex and expansive shell. At one point in “Patterns” the guitars sound like a troupe of royal horns announcing the start of the spooky sung mantra, “the pattern is revealed, the pattern is revealed.” In actuality, while there is always obviously a pattern going on in Mouth of the Architect’s music, the blends or snaps into the next phases constantly keep the listener guessing at a nice, heady level.
Like the wind passing over the ocean in between hurricanes, the tracks often start and end with waves of noise, a cooling break before or after the onslaught of chugging and blasting gale-force hypno-trauma that makes up the majority of the music. The vocal harmonies start to sound like a mix between bad weather and the siren songs of large, angelic robots. The notes hold long and loud enough to both disorient and soothe, and then the voices and language remind you that all these pounding sound vistas were actually recorded by real human beings – from drab-city Dayton, Ohio, no less – humans who recorded in their guitarist’s home studio in between mortal trappings of wives, children, other jobs, etc. You don’t have to be an otherworldly beast to sound like one after all.