Aseethe - Hopes of Failure

ATTN:Magazine

With some doom bands, you feel the initial impact and nothing more. With the first blow comes a numbness; a buffer of bruising against the second and third and fourth, as the riff reaches its peak of strength and promptly levels out. I’ve been to countless gigs where the euphoria of that first eruption – the sudden awakening of every instrument, every limb, every ear simultaneously, enacted with such a force that almost makes me stagger back – is followed by 90 minutes of flatline, as players and instruments and audience all settle back into a mutual, if slightly louder, sense of stasis. Hopes Of Failure doesn’t have this problem. Aseethe understand how to disturb the equilibrium just enough to renew the sense of urgency. They pull back for a moment. They slow down ever so slightly. They resonate for a fraction longer than anyone expects. They suck out the momentum and implant it anew. When the guitars strike again, I’m off balance and vulnerable, stumbling over the crags of jagged tempo and sudden rifts in progress. Without a predictable, metronomic consistency through which to anticipate the next movement, I’m never able to brace myself.

I’ve seen references to Aseethe as a doom counterpart to Neurosis, which I can definitely hear. Both bands feel like freighters sinking under the weight of their cargo, reduced to a perilous crawl by the distortion mounted upon their backs, lurching forward as the engine revives and slumps in a miserable near-death cycle. Yet where Neurosis are forced to bear a more melancholic burden, Aseethe are carrying concrete. Cold, monochromatic, entirely unsympathetic. Riffs of brutalist right-angles and functional simplicity. At several points the album verges on collapsing under this faceless load; “Towers Of Dust” decelerates as the power chords press downward, resonating and sinking into the snare and cymbals, seemingly slower each time the riff renews itself; the lop-sided alternation of palm-mutes and open strings on “Barren Soil” falters forth on crooked wheels, while screams announce themselves from states of cathartic exhaustion as opposed to vehemence and power. So what exactly is the product of all this strain and labour? I start to feel that the very load that pushes itself into the backs of Aseethe – this heft of percussion collision and amplifier vibration – is in fact a monument to the futility of everything. We endure this burden for no reward.

Pitchfork 60

Though Aseethe identify as a doom act, the prominent noise samples on 2011 debut Reverent Burden showed that the Iowa City trio was trying to do more than just sludgeon its audience into submission. Aseethe have since recorded an improv album, a suite of re-worked riffs by avant-doom duo Barn Owl, an EP featuring synth accompaniment, and a rendition of Black Sabbath’s “Rat Salad” stretched and slowed beyond recognition. Across that entire body of work, Aseethe maintained an atmosphere and textures verging on ambient drone.

On Hopes of Failure, Aseethe shed their sound’s flaky outer layers in favor of ultra-dense riffs that creep by like boiling molasses. True, they built Reverent Burden on similarly solid riffing, but this time they offer less in the way of sonic detail. The new album—four tunes ranging from eight-and-a-half to 14 minutes—drones on without the subtleties that distinguished Aseethe in the first place. And because it lacks the space and sweep of their previous work, Hopes of Failure marginalizes the industrial-metal gloom furnished by drummer Eric Diercks’ samples.

The new material doesn’t reward the patience of letting the songs unfold nearly as effectively as this band always has. Diehard doom aficionados will likely appreciate Hopes of Failure as a purposeful trimming of extraneous fat. But it’s puzzling that Aseethe would choose to recast themselves as something of a conventional doom band at this stage, after repeatedly demonstrating that there’s more to what they do.

It would be one thing if the fidelity of the recording could approximate the sensation of standing in front of amplifier cabinets, having your chest rattled by the sheer density of sound. But that’s not the case. It’s not that the recording is necessarily flat, but Hopes of Failure doesn’t say anything we haven’t already heard after decades’ worth of tone-obsessed artists getting better and better at capturing on mic the way speaker cones move air through a room. Compared to 2014’s Burdens II, it’s almost shocking how little Hopes of Failure conveys a sense of the band in a physical setting.

At times, the album does hint at the wrinkles Aseethe have added to doom. “Barren Soil,” for example, begins with a Danny Barr bassline so deep it seems to dip toward subsonic frequencies. That said, every note is audible and you can actually hum along to the melody—no small feat when you’re dealing with timbres that tend to smother pitch. And in a dramatic departure for the band, Barr also sings a clean verse on closing track “Into the Sun.” After Barr and his brother, guitarist and founder Brian Barr, have spent a half hour barking, the shift to relatively melodic vocals enhances the album’s acerbic mood.

But the band opts not to emphasize these features. Stripped of its usual dimension, Aseethe’s music consigns the Barr brothers’ lyrics to the realm of unremarkable negativity. Clearly, Aseethe have made a concerted effort to streamline their approach, but Hopes of Failure only underscores how much better off they are when they stick to their guns. As such, it functions best as a gateway to a more colorful back catalog.