Copyright © 2004 Hydra Head
1. 1) Your Path To Divinity
2. 2) Friends Are Evil
3. 3) Tired Of Me
4. 4) We All Faulter
5. 5) Walk On Water
6. 6) Sun Day
7. 7) Man/Woman
8. 8) Guardian Angel
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Of the so-called "post-rock" genre, formed by combining jazzy modern rock with emo punk rock and artcore metal, few releases manage to do more than emo did, which is give you something to cry to - with a catchy chorus. Ex-Godflesh personnel however manage to synthesize the cartographic song format of Godflesh with the droning, husky, textural noise of Final, and with an injection of the declining melodies of punk from Fugazi onward, make a record that can be contemplated like a black metal album but used to set a mood in the way ambient records always have. Admittedly, it's a bit heavy on the droning minor-key madness, and it is simplistic as hell, leading to repetition that will burn some listeners who need immediate motion fixes at all times. Its operating principle is that if you layer complementary patterns at different offsets, and then maneuver a song so that its dominant theme is revealed by both layer separation and synthesis of conflicted motifs, the end result is a moment of suspension like the contented sigh of seeing clouds part for a new moon. Those who liked Godflesh will find this is everything that band ever was, minus what some idiots started calling "bombast" back in the 1990s: rigid, shocking riff salads. It's rhythmic in a subdued way, and contemplative, almost like a piece for meditation, yet retains much of what metal and industrial often neglect, which is the construction of mood through melody in a context that pairs harmony with rhythm. For recent works which use distorted guitars, this is one of the best, and a better future influence for metal than the unsubtle and precociously self-obsessed "metalcore."
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