 Neurosis - Given to the Rising Review
by Mark Hensch
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All hail the returning kings! Spawned in 1986 with their Black demo, Neurosis would spend the next two decades creating a definitive and unique sound the likes of which is nothing short of a religious experience. Gestated in a womb of musical influences ranging from tribal to folk to sludge to crust to hardcore to punk to doom, Given to the Rising is every facet that Neurosis has shown of their timeless, immortal sound, refracted through the lens of age. Infinitely more mature than the band's already weighty works, this disc is the culmination of twenty years of societal scorn and it shows. Massive, glorious, and inherently good, Given to the Rising often sounds less like a work of simple metal music and more like a work of God's righteous fury turned to sound.
The crushing divinity of "Given to the Rising" itself proves this right off the bat. The song unleashes a colossal riff that is utterly Herculean in sound. Meanwhile, the band's trademark metallic alchemy shivers and swirls in chilling, diamond-dusted clouds all around, spilling black lightning and burning everything to the ground. Frontman Scott Kelly occasionally permits the use of drifting auroras of delicate sound---but make no bones about it, his somber whispers mutate into scathing howls with remarkable intensity and these are some of the legendary frontman's most brutal roars yet. In a remarkable show of restraint, the song builds itself into the initial, fiery universe, and then disintegrates into a humming buzz. From here, an entirely new cosmos is birthed in splendid, jaw-dropping fashion, as the band unleashes a rapturous melody which twists and snakes through one's ears with glittering wonder.
"Fear and Sickness" kicks all kinds of ass, its ominous orbital beeps soon merging into a paranoid crawl both ambient and wicked, the kind of thing that Godspeed You Black Emperor! did with modern-zombie classic 28 Days Later. The song eventually warps into a biting vortex of chaotic embers, a burning snake of sound that wraps around in coils before eating itself in truly hypnotic fashion. Stark, beautiful, and frightening all at the same time, "Fear and Sickness" makes it apparent that this will be one difficult album to scale.
Thankfully, "To the Wind" emerges and offers one a brief respite. The song's wistful folk intro recalls Neurosis side-project Tribes of Neurot. Soon, the song explodes into a driving, sludge-driven anthem every bit as shoegazing and anathemic as it was previously, making for an interesting twist. As if all of this wasn't enough, the eventual descent into Pelican worthy spookiness topped with Kelly's soft croon is icing on the cake...at least until he lets loose a thirty-second howl and the song drops a bomb of crushing riffs in each listener's lap.
"At the End of the Road" festers for the majority of its droning, misanthropic existence. Always hovering between tribal ritual and plodding, mechanical sturm 'n drang, the song sounds like the collapse of sickened, wheezing civilization. "Shadow" is a brief, apocalyptic narrative wrapped in grim fuzz, and a nice transition into the next half of the disc. This part is jumpstarted properly by "Hidden Faces," an expansive universal dirge. Luminous with a sort of star-fire, the song burns slowly but with great intensity, never really leaving its crawling holocaust. "Water is not Enough" is a chugging, complex monster that is equal parts ISIS, Mastodon, and Meshuggah. Simplistic melodies emerge like evolved sea-going crustaceans first stepping tentatively onto land, and the song coalesces into a towering breakdown of prehistoric proportions.
"Distil (Watching the Swarm)" is up next, its pummeling whirl of schizophrenic dystopia soon healed by gentle, wave-like notes. As I listen to it again-and-again, I find it ironic how such a simple part of an album this immeasurably vast can be one of the most powerful sections. A brief return to the blistering catharsis is soon erased by a fragile, spiritual psychosis. This in turn ends with a fist-pumping beatdown, the kind only a band this well-versed in shifting tempos can deliver.
The disc ends with a fantastic one-two punch combo, the first being "Nine." "Nine" is yet another dark soliloquy ala "Shadow," yet it is the necessary prologue for something as engrossingly gigantic as "Origin." At an intimidating eleven minutes or so, "Origin" is Given to the Rising's epic, a song so huge I can barely touch it. A twisting drum passage writhes through the darkness, all before a celestial chord progression and some bourbon-soaked whispers drift by. As "Origin" quietly builds itself into a nuclear meltdown, one can be forgiven for following its angular passages of misleading twists-and-turns only to find nothing. When the BANG really does come, the end result is an utter obliteration beyond my puny talents as a writer to describe.
Given to the Rising is one of those rare albums utterly outside linear time; all at once it is looking backwards, forwards, and nowhere at all. It looks backwards insofar as it takes every element that has made Neurosis the metal titans they are, and reapplies them into yet another wholly original template. It looks nowhere as it is not needing too, being one of the best albums currently around and a definite must-have for 2007. And lastly, it looks forward as it has set the bar even higher for Neurosis, bringing their level of sonic engineering well past the heights of Mount Everest. As stated previously in the review, Given to the Rising is less a CD and more a spiritual transformation. My parting words are that one now seek this out, and be transformed. This one deserves the elusive "10."
Neurosis' Given to the Rising
1. Given to the Rising
2. Fear and Sickness
3. To the Wind
4. At the End of the Road
5. Shadow
6. Hidden Faces
7. Water is Not Enough
8. Distil (Watching the Swarm)
9. Nine
10. Origin
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Neurosis - Given to the Rising
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