ASVA – What You Don’t Know is Frontier

Surprisingly, doom metal has revealed itself to be conducive and eccentric fertile delta for avant garde experimentations. Asva pulls member participations from the similarly slow minded Earth, Faith No More’s longer lasting tangent Mr. Bungle and the dank slow make your ears bleed assault of Burning Witch. Inspired largely from band leader Stuart Dahlquist’s emotional upheaval following his brother’s death, Asva’s second album reveals a band revolting against their very genre expectations with predictable and unpredictable strategies.

What You Don’t Know is Frontier comprises four epic length, slow time dirges that elicit contemplation more than despondency. Though hyperbolic, it almost seems a mistake to call the group a metal band as it may almost seem a coincidence when the sludge riffs do emerge coherently. “Christopher Columbus” is halfway over by the time slow metal riffing creeps into the sonic caverns. Asva’s diverse musical influences source from 20th century modernist composition, century end minimalism, droning, Bach, Mozart and early Black Sabbath. Classical composition structures and bone breaking psycho analytical guitar riffs deviate from clichéd one way conversation aggression characteristic of metal.

With kinetic potentiality that at moments seems to tilt over into a bottomless chasm, Asva’s eccentric avante metal explores mysterious musical spaces beyond the mapped boundary lines comprising surface reality and psyche geographic normality. Such cinematic qualities can naturally influence one beyond the listening experience into heavy reflections that wander through the very heart of humanity’s nonlinear emotional experiences. A historical sense remains vital through out the very detailed sonic voyage. Though the ambiguously new world deflowering fool Christopher Columbus is invoked, Asva are much more like conquistadors a la Cabaza De Vaca trudging through a profoundly uncertain wild land shaded with weird wonder yet also lurking with malefic, perplexing forces. Allegorically, Asva mirror Vaca whose explorations reveal him as a brutally callous murderer yet also one changed through unprecedented absurdist hardship into a shamanistic medicine man for the very native tribal people he initially despised.

Unusual, the album begins with the title song, whose title sources from a poem written by Dahlquist’s deceased brother. Detuned, growling, sludge baritone guitar repeats with stoic infinity like an icy avalanche in slow motion. A yowling, minor key distorted, wah squealing inflected guitar hovers menacingly high in the mix. Such morbid gloominess is off set by a surprising Bach like religious church organ fugue that seems to illustrate shimmering hope upon a retreating cataclysm.

The unforgiving attitude of an always down tempo sloping through cavernous non linearity music exploratory of dripping monumental slow motions in large sounding spaces can easily make a listener drowsy or even feel malevolently pressed by the uncompromising, annoying obsessive compulsiveness. Depending on your mood, such plodding willfulness can seem bombastic and minutely pretentious that ponderously skirts the perfect prescription for plain out boredom. Repeating similarities in the first and fourth song certainly unite the album as whole, yet can also make one feel your stamina is being overtly tested. The album does not pander to entertainment or encapsulate any typical, pop cultural emotional empathy in any tidy middle of the road way.

By track three, “A Game In Hell, Hard Work In Heaven,” the listener certainly is under the influence of witnessing vast mood swings in a sonic perpetuating grandiose twilight. An emerging passage of wordless, visceral flesh and blood female vocals are reassuring in an album that is mostly devoutly devoted to a deafening, divine loneliness carouseling with a revolving cast of spectral presences.

What You Don’t Know is Frontier ferries Asva further from what was already a loose association with the doom metal genre’s power point expectations, most poignantly by embracing diverging musical moments that are inspired from epiphany charged revelations of sanguine serenity. The band harnesses metal’s slugging amplified heavy handed power not to assault but to speculate. Though the group are native to a slanted light bleak dusk, Asva questionably spurn their instinctually dominating stony hair shirt disposition into a multi dimensional emotional voyage that betrays the hard worn experience of knowing peace and acceptance. Depending on personal proclivities, one will be sucked in to the pastoral super naturalness or be dismayed and dismiss the whole solemn jiving religiosity.

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Tagged as: doom metal, slowcore

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