See on the horizon…..

Neurosis are set to release a new studio album ‘Given To The Rising’ on May 7th, their first worldwide release on their own Neurot imprint, with a new track made available on their myspace page.

My initial impressions are that the band have brought back some of the brutality that made ‘Through Silver In Blood’ one of the most ugly things ever put to tape, however after the initial giddy excitement I experienced a mixed reaction to the teaser track.

The outro of resonant and beckoning chimes is an indication that the neurotic (sorry) elements that make the band so potent are going to be present in full effect.

The first four minutes, however, go from bludgeoning ‘Times Of Grace’ era chugg to, effectively, sounding like Mastodon. Well, it sounds like Neurosis, but bands like Mastodon and Isis have popularised the gargantuan aesthetic of the earlier Neurosis records to such an extent that I find myself a little underwhelmed. Admittedly, those two bands have developed their own distinct styles (Neurosis even had a track on “The Eye Of Every Storm” that sounded frighteningly like Isis), but it is the ensuing bandwagon of pale imitations that has left me cold.

Everytime I go back to Kuwait for Christmas I take my family a CD or two of a range of stuff, and my little brother usually ends up taking to a track from it. One year it was Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Fix Up Look Sharp’ , last year it was E-40’s ‘Tell Me When To Go’ ( quite similar tracks, come to think of it). My point being that over the course of the holiday, bless him, he manages to exhaust my tolerance of said song by playing it, singing it and talking about it incessantly.

The Mastodon hype, coupled with every metal scenester’s mutual decision to name their band after a monster of some sorts, albeit from myth, dinosaur book or aquatic encyclopedia (I missed that meeting), has exhausted my tolerance of the aesthetic. It’s a cruel irony that in paying tribute to your heroes one can exhaust their appeal, but, like with my little brother, that seems to be what has happened. He is 13 and has an excuse, I wonder what the ‘avant metal’ crowd have to say for their lack of imagination – and no, putting 0))) after your name on your myspace page does not make you exempt from this argument, you are just a newer model.

That said, here’s hoping the record takes my head off.