Recording artist: Apse
Release: Spirit (LP)
Notable tracks: Any one but the first two
Money quote: (not sure how to answer this one: see below)
Recommendation: Buy a copy
It’s been a while since I’ve listened to an album, even longer since I’ve bought one. We all get preoccupied with other things, we’re all easily distracted; listening to singles in the car and to our iPods at work agrees with our collective split-second attention span. I’m not being a cultural scold: singles are convenient the same way that sandwiches are convenient, and sandwiches can be both delicious and quite healthy. But at least once a year you should treat yourself to a full turkey dinner, with giblet gravy, jalapeno cornbread stuffing, green beans, mom’s fruit salad, carrot cake for dessert and a bottle or two of wine. Just as your folks cook all day to make those flavors interact, using this ingredient from this dish as a fundamental part of that one, musicians would prefer you to, every once in a while, think of their albums as something a bit more systematic than turkey sandwich leftovers.
Spirit, a 2006 full-length Apse release, is an odd return for me to the medium.
It is damp with wall-of-sound reverb, but this is not space rock. It is thick with distortion, but this is not metal. It is haunted with dark space and open spaces, and it is composed instead of written, but this is not post-rock. The vocals are buried and uneven, but this is not indie rock. The tracks are epic in length, and sometimes wink with eastern eyes, but this is not psychedelia. And while there are long interludes of rhythm section march, this is most definitely not a jam band. Clever ensembles wear influences on their sleeves, and those even more clever will fuse these divergent genres. But a remarkable band transcends their favorite genres.
So, is Apse transcendent? Is Spirit remarkable? Yes to both. For the most part.
The LP opens recklessly: a throw-away intro and Yet Another Downtempo Track (“From the North”) squander the first five minutes. The record really opens with “Legions” and it really opens with “Shade of the Moor” (At the same time, all of these drum and bass and rhythm guitar sidebars cause you to fear that Robert Toher will divide the audience into left and right and see which half can scream “rock and roll” the loudest. Recovering metalheads, and I do not exclude myself, will wade through these tense crescendos for the furious explosion that never comes.)
The finest cuts are the uptempo ones: “The Crowned” is kinetic and frazzled. “Earth Covers Us” is dark, always advancing, and absolutely timeless. “Ark” has a creepy carnival feel, and we can only speculate to what the title refers.
This brings us to the (hopefully) one open space in the review: the lyric sheet. The vocals are so buried and the lyrics so indecipherable, a literary critique of Spirit seems a violation of, frankly, the spirit of the album. The internet is a big, bold place, though, so if this is your wont, go dig up the lyrics on your own and see if they transcend.
