Iapetus 2024
Afterglow
Like the dust that settles all around, Berlin ensemble’s mini-album brings together alchemical elements of their rhyme and reason.
It’s easy to assume the half-hour offering, appearing hot on the heels of the incendiary "Extinction Level" that slightly reformatted this foursome’s method, is comprised of its outtakes, yet letting the “Afterglow” title mislead their listener must be a part of the German band’s modus operandi. What they do here should amount to iridescent exposure of the players’ way of thinking via the revelation of various details which allow them to create something almost unbearably bracing within a frequently heavy framework. As a result, surprises are aplenty on the quartet’s four quasi-surplus numbers – enough to keep the audience focused one minute and jolted to a different plane of existence the other.
It’s just as easy to perceive epic opener “Shards Of Death” and the little album’s finale “Crystal Cabin” as opposite ends of dynamic, and sentimental, spectrum. Yet while the blistering former finds deceptively chthonic riffs and seemingly haphazard licks in suspended animation, with Alexander Paul Dowerk and Markus Reuter Touch guitars bathing in the liquid light of Bernhard Wöstheinrich’s synthesizers and moored by Asaf Sirkis’ drums, the translucent latter, briefly hinted at in the platter’s beginning, inhabits the ether where resonance and fragility swirl faster and faster and conspire to stun a person’s soul. That’s why the molten, even monolithic, if finely filigreed, “Morgentod” and the multilayered, exquisitely convoluted and hypnotic “Behind The Veil” – which are bookended by the two aforementioned extremities on a thematic level too – demonstrate a harder surface with fluctuating density.
There couldn’t be a better study of what A&B try and deliver time and time again, and there’s no better entry point to their catalogue than this.
*****
