Glacier - More Distant/More Violent

A Closer Listen

Last year we reviewed A Distant, Violent Shudder, a sludgy behemoth of an album that we compared to a glacier cleaving and falling into the sea.  This year the Boston quintet returns with the sequel-minded More Distant/More Violent, featuring one new track and four remixes.  Yet it would be improper to call this a remix album, as the tracks flow together in new and exciting ways; better to call it a reimagining.

That new ten-minute track, “The Barren Soil,” leads off the set.  Glacier is nothing if not generous.  The soil only seems barren for 44 seconds, as the guitars are doing some hasty planting, getting the field ready for the drums.  A minute later, the track is already rocking, and it just keeps building from there.  The stereo effects are all-enveloping, the depth of field crushing.  One would be hard-pressed to call the softer parts (in the fourth minute) an interlude; instead, they imitate the retreat of a wave that one knows will return in full force, and when it does, it knocks the listener off their feet.  There’s a great metal slowdown in the sixth minute that we suspect will sound devastating live; drones and distortion swirl and accumulate.  Then static and drum: a coiled segment that settles into a slow groove without releasing any of the tension.

And now things get really interesting.  The opening track of the parent album, a multi-part epic that we wrote about in detail last time, is now the closing track of the new album, and it’s gained some extra words; no longer “Grief Rolled in Like a Storm,” but “Anguish Rolled in Like a Distant, Violent Storm of Grief.”  Credit thisquietarmy for the new and noticeably different version, which leaves the concluding monologue on the table and turns the track into a vast wall of guitar drone.  The former interlude disappears in a sonic cloud, the final half of the piece an unrelenting fog.

“The old timers said they’d never seen nothin’ like that” seems to have been bifurcated, as not only does Eeli Helin commingle it with “Sand Bitten Lungs” (the last track of the parent album) as “Sand Bitten Old Timers,” but a second version later appears from We Lost the Sea (whose own excellent album was just released), titled “Old Timer Spiritual Recalibration.”  In the first rendition, the rock gives way to an atmospheric haze, underlining just how much More Distant/More Violent stands on its own merits; while using the same source material, here it sounds like a totally different album, the single drumbeats as foreboding as an approaching, unseen beast.  We’re not even sure if the old timers survived the massive midsection (4:42-5:14):  both more distant and more violent.

We Lost the Sea takes different liberties, preserving the sense of build while subsuming the role of the bass and adding nearly inaudible radio transmissions.  In this context, Recalibration may be an even more fitting word than reimagining; the sudden attack of drums arrives as a surprise, rather than an outgrowth.  Or perhaps one should say the first, because by the second attack, the listener is prepared.  This leaves only the somewhat-title track, which began its life as the nine-minute “Distant/Violent,” and in the hands of ameokama is half the length, which makes it the obvious choice for a single.  The huge distorted crunches are great additions, as are the alternating patterns of static and blast, the most “remix”-styled segment of the set, giving way to a distant ( ! ) howl and the sense that nothing is going to be all right.  The later back-and-forth (beginning at 3:47) is even more beguiling, building to a frantic industrial end.

These guest artists seem to have discovered nuances in Glacier’s music that the band may not have been aware of.  Their universally drastic and unrelenting efforts have paid off in what seems like a completely new album, a revelation to fans and newcomers alike.  (Richard Allen)