Extra Life - The Sacred Vowel

A Closer Listen

From the outset, we are faced with an interesting decision on the part of a band known for its challenging, unique musical imaginary: a lullaby. Extra Life has done this before, in 2012’s Dream Seeds, but this time around it is not the marker of an esoteric abrasiveness – the positive decomposition of life in dream – but almost its opposite, a worldliness in which creation is the beautiful baseness of onanistic impulse. “Corrupt, Corrupt”, that first track, for instance, mostly mobilizes the voice within the terms of the clear, modal singing that characterizes the band, accompanied by a sweet piano melody, producing a sense of prayerful soliloquy. Yet it also mobilizes the voice as monstrous echo, as distorted dialogue, as a striking bell that turns the meditation into melancholic nightmare, like the spasmodic reminders that medieval mystics emphasized as the storms of energy curling their flesh into approximately divine forms. The sparse instrumentation reinforces the contrast of clarity and obscurity, but in a way that does not exactly separate them entirely from each other, rather integrating them into a dynamic in which their boundaries are changing. As risky as such a proposition for an opening track sounds, the band pulls it off, a prelude to what is perhaps its most soothing album to date.

That does not mean, of course, that the material is not dark, lyrically and musically speaking. It is a darkness that shines, that beckons not as pure disorder but as the possibility of order, of a world materialized by controlled spasms, by organized compulsion, like a cloistered visionary emitting new realities in every muscle twist. Like the first track, the rest of the album is extremely disciplined about its use of instrumentation: the bass in “I’m Normal”, the second track, is also used like a bell, every strike clearly defined; the violin becomes a stylized additional voice that is never lost in the chaotic potential of the lingering sounds of the bass; the drums intervene precisely for us to keep attentive to the path being followed. While it would be tempting to see a clear-cut hierarchy that follows the voice, this discipline with which every instrument plays key complementary roles structures the album’s music as a flexible order of subversion. Modernist techniques abound, from silence to dissonance to tonal distortions, continually indicating a decentralizing dynamic, an essential lack that is resolved, moment to moment, in the realization of each composition. At times, as in the very beginning of the last track, “The Sacred Vowel”, it even creates the sense of improv, an immediacy in the relations between each instrument that is otherwise difficult to achieve.

In fruitful illusions like this is exactly where the album’s themes grow: the extraordinary derived from the ordinary, the collapse of high and low as the collapse of the cerebral, intellectual qualities associated with avant-garde and progressive rock into the base impulses and mud-baked reflections of the lyrics. The territory of gods, now hollowed, advanced upon by means of the revelations of the limitless constraints, the joys, of bodily suffering. The compositions follow suit, for instance, in the medievalized, almost folksy strings of “Haven’t Learned a Thing”, which craft an interestingly peaceful sense of development in a track that is lyrically full of tension. This is as close to a ballad as the band has made, and of course, like the lullaby with which the album begins, it traverses that empty territory to fill it with the bright opaqueness of humanity, to bring that holiness home. The effects of this crossing come to the fore in “Three Worms”, led by a chant, a prayer that fills the world not with divine greening (as von Bingen idealized), but with a more modernist divine blackening; the outer presence called upon by this solemn appeal is not that of an earthly mother, but a Saturnian father. Its power, that of electronic noises, of a lingering background drone, of drums ordering our attention towards a fundamental lack of bodily rhythm only to shift towards a rushing heartbeat’s pace, nakedly show the quest for meaning as a shame, as self-torture. “The Sacred Vowel” immediately follows with a bright, tranquil strings drone, the dissolution of that paternal figure into festival, the settling of the Saturnalia – anarchy as order –. As the closing piece, it presents us with a musical carnival, every instrument coming together with the same discipline, except for the purpose of release, of building up tension as a positive development. The titular vowel is meaningless, and thus safe, as comforting as pure impulsivity. The music ends with a grand disruption, finally mixing up every sound at once.

The journey traced here begins and ends with a sort of compulsion for nurture, for finding care in the abyss. It is the journey of the mystic interpreted negatively, seeing in base matter a divine sort of beauty, transcendental ecstasy but a side-effect of disciplined dedication to the body. The mix of medieval and modernist techniques produces it perfectly; a worm in a skyscraper, a stainless-steel needle buried in the ground, shimmering with pain and happiness, populating above and below with love ferocious, with exquisite self-effacement – the world, here and now. (David Murrieta Flores)