Glacier - A Distant, Violent Shudder

A Closer Listen

A camera crew captures an astonishing moment.  At first there is the large, imposing mass, shattering all sense of scale.  Then, by a stroke of serendipity, the glacier cleaves, a huge segment, as wide as tall as a skyscraper, falls into the sea.  The crew is momentarily elated, until a giant wall of water and ice comes rushing toward the ship.  They are nearly capsized, fortunate to be alive.  After the brush with death, an engulfing silence.  This is the sound of Glacier.

The cover proposes an alternate adventure: one is driving into an apocalyptic event, a massive and unavoidable storm.  By sheer (good or bad) fortune, this is the scenario I experienced while queuing up the album in my car, heading home into a bank of intense thunderstorms.  The opening track: “Grief Rolled in Like a Storm.”  We might extract the word “grief” from the title, as the storm was literal. The music proved to be a perfect match: a thirteen-minute behemoth of sizzle and roar, rumbling and popping in anticipation prior to the lightning and bombast, the downpour and cacophony.  Even the early riffs are powerful; Glacier has no interest in long ambient preludes.  When the music slows in the fourth minute, it’s like the brief moment when the skies turn white and one wonders if one has escaped the violence; but then, the deluge.  This interim segment, nearly but not acoustic, demonstrates incredible restraint and highlights the quintet’s mastery of dynamic contrast.  The music slows like car wheels.  One spots an overpass in the distance, but alas, too far. And then the clouds burst, the guitars let loose their fury, the tempo increases with the wind.

The opening track topples directly into the second, “The old timers said they’d never seen nothin’ like that,” like that glacier to the sea.  By now we know that the sluggish introductory tempo is just a smokescreen; rock is coming.  The air will turn thick and humid, the guitars dense and intense. The drums will roll as rapidly as a single drummer can drum.  Then a sudden stop and a second eruption.  Had those old timers ever heard nothin’ like that?  We suspect they had not.  Nor had they heard a single guitar separate itself from the pack, wailing above the sludge.

The album’s intensity never wanes; the only way to slow it down is to reach the end of a side of vinyl.  “Distant/Violent” is a lurker, a stalker tracking its prey.  By the time the album reaches its twelve-minute finale, “Sand Bitten Lungs,” there’s no doubt that giant and dangerous things are coming.  We’re on the ship, and the glacier has just cleaved; we’re out on the highway, in the path of the storm.  The distant, violent shudder is now a clear and present danger.  (Richard Allen)