| Reviews for Orthodox (Esp)'s Gran Poder |
| Semana Satan - 88% |
| Written by Bertilak
on August 12th, 2008
|
| Orthodox come from the burningly hot southern Spanish city of Seville and model their image, with full robes and pointed hoods, on the Catholic penitential brotherhoods, who are most prominent during the spectacular processions held throughout the week leading up to Easter known as ‘Semana Santa’. Indeed, the ‘Gran Poder’ of the title is a reference to one of these brotherhoods – Hermandad de Jesús de Gran Poder (Brotherhood of Jesus of the Great Power), founded in 1431. Without wishing to make this review too self-indulgently autobiographical, my girlfriend lived in Seville for a number of years. Consequently, I have seen the Semana Santa processions and can attest to their mesmerising power, as hordes of hooded candle-bearing figures, many barefoot, process slowly through the cobbled streets alongside huge ornate floats that are carried by groups of concealed men, struggling beneath. The processions of the many brotherhoods wind across Seville at (literally) staggered intervals through the days and well into the nights. The fact that Orthodox have positioned this Catholic religious spectacle so centrally in their own metal aesthetic may seem somewhat paradoxical. However, it is worth noting that only one procession in the whole of Seville’s Semana Santa celebrates Christ’s resurrection. Every other procession throughout the week focuses on some stage of Jesus’ suffering on the way to, or immediately after, the crucifixion. Orthodox, similarly, are not here to celebrate rebirth but instead to wallow in drawn-out agony. Orthodox have described themselves in interviews as offering “a pagan view of Christianity” and feeling an attraction to “its mysticism, its spirituality and its concept of ritual”. This outsider fascination and love of the ritualised unknowable lies at the heart of ‘Gran Poder’. ‘Gran Poder’ is dominated by its opening track ‘Geryon’s Throne’, which, in the vinyl edition, sprawls over both sides of the first disc, split into Part I and Part II. Within these formal parts, the track is really comprised of four sections that seamlessly blend together. A heavily downtuned guitar opens the first section with slow, fluid chords, joined by an equally downtuned bass that echoes the snail-paced riff. The sense of low, deep menace that these two instruments convey is heightened by a shimmering cymbal that wafts over the song like a heat haze. Gradually, the drums become more prominent, growing from static thumps to fill-ins of snare as the bass too becomes more free-form in the gaps between the repeating riff. The achingly slow but tightly focused control of the track’s development is very effective, the guitar riff mutating as each chord is held to the point of feedback. All these elements then drop away to leave just the bass, signalling the second phase of ‘Geryon’s Throne’. Guitar feedback winds over the top of the bass before a fresh riff, favourably reminiscent of Tony Iommi’s early glories, kicks in ahead of the vocals. Orthodox’s vocals are one of the most distinctive elements across ‘Gran Poder’ and serve to give the band its unique character. Essentially, they are light and quite high but always distorted and towards the middle or back of the mix. This makes the words hard to distinguish but the slow, deliberate delivery and agonised long emphasis of each syllable creates a disconcertingly otherworldly element in the music. Part I of ‘Geryon’s Throne’ is brought to a close with a slow and echoed guitar solo, high toned and sinuous, which, thanks to the strong reverb, seems to double back on itself. Part II then opens with a low bass hum that builds into grinding distortion. This atonal, unstructured background is added to by undulating guitar feedback, as the drum grows from a single snare to a full percussive freak-out. The feedback then reasserts itself, providing a far more loose feel than the measured control of Part I, as randomly plucked strings and cymbals build up to another maelstrom of drumming. This sense of an improvised jam session is comparable to Boris’ more psychedelic moments but just as the track seems in danger of disappearing up its own jazzy tendencies it suddenly resolves itself into a fantastic, tightly wound, urgent riff that is heavy and crushing, driven on by rolling drums. This sudden crystallising focus is bolstered by anxious, compelling vocals, more distorted and distant than previously, before a tense, fast guitar solo that is high and melodic. This final section then falls back to the lethargic riff from the second section of Part I to bring the track to a close with stuttering drums. ‘Geryon’s Throne’ is a confident opener, built up in distinct sections but nonetheless well rounded and coherent as a single musical piece. Its long shadow over ‘Gran Poder’ is illustrated by the fact that while this opening disc has just the one track, the second disc has five. In black metal circles, of course, the north is key. It is standard to talk about an album’s ‘coldness’ as a measure of its quality, whether the vocals ‘freeze’ and the guitars ‘chill’. But Orthodox comes from a southern city where the summer temperatures regularly push 50ºC, so coldness probably doesn’t mean a great deal to them. However, in the same way that Norwegian bands made their environment part of their musical identity, so Orthodox manage to do with theirs. Consequently, the sluggish, torpid pace of the band’s music can be seen as reflecting their own oppressive environment, a heat so crushing that everything has to slow to a crawl. Orthodox’s doom metal is not so much the embodiment of an emotion, but of a place. Even ‘Geryon’s Throne’ relates to this, the mythical Geryon inhabiting the region of Tartessos in Andalucia. This sense of place carries through to the sleeve design, a stark, black, high-gloss cover with just the image of a traditional elaborate wrought-iron cross, familiar from the numerous churches across Seville (and maybe also a subtle nod to the way Orthodox put a Spanish twist on Black Sabbath’s influence). Unfortunately, the design as a whole is let down by numerous glaring typos and grammatical errors in the lyrics and titles (‘Ofícío de Tinieblas’ is garbled into ‘Ofícío de Timeblas’ in the worst instance), which is far from the usual perfectionism of a Southern Lord release. The second disc begins with ‘Arrodillate Ante la Madera y la Píedra’ (‘Kneel Before the Wood and the Stone’), which has a slow, elastic bass playing simple notes, mirrored by a distorted guitar with droning feedback looping over the top. Borja Diaz Vera’s accomplished and ornate drumming is crucial to Orthodox and here the track’s lethargic core is nicely contrasted by frenetic, disjointed drums that eventually slow to just emphasising cymbal strokes around the customary wrenched, distant vocal, each note drawn out with desperate conviction. A mournful, arpeggio guitar chord, higher in tone than the other elements, gradually develops into a meandering, fuzzed out guitar lead that intertwines with the vocal. The simplicity of ‘Arrodillate…’ is then taken yet further by ‘Ofícío de Tinieblas’, which is barely 90 seconds long. The track again concerns Semana Santa, referring to an evening service (literally, ‘Service of Darkness’) traditionally held one evening in the week during which 13 candles are progressively extinguished to leave the congregation in darkness. A crisp drum march is overlaid by a sharp piano, counterpointing low chords and high notes, the song fading away almost as soon as it has emerged. Although short, ‘Ofícío de Tinieblas’ cleverly maintains the tension already built up by ‘Gran Poder’ and its brevity after two lengthy tracks is compelling. One benefit of the vinyl release (despite the proofreading meltdown) is the presence of two bonus tracks, in which Orthodox acknowledge their debts to Black Sabbath and Venom. The first of these is of ‘Black Sabbath’ itself and it’s a measure of the band’s assurance that they took on such an iconic track. It’s a measure of their ability that they make a pretty good job of it. Wisely dispensing with the thunder and tolling bell, their version of the deathless principal riff is essentially faithful, although more fuzzed out, with a sharp snare emphasis and nice use of the piano to underscore the final note. The echoed vocals are noticeably clearer than in Orthodox’s own tracks and make no attempt to copy Ozzy’s style. Happily, the strong Spanish accent sets the performance a mile apart from the original and lends it its own definite southern European flavour. As the track builds, the guitar tone lowers and the vocals become more distorted. Ricardo Jimenez Gómez offers a briefer take on Iommi’s original closing solo but it still displays the characteristically fluid, almost underwater quality of his performances on the rest of the album. Their self-confidence is further demonstrated by the addition of a coda featuring a different riff, fading-out during a nicely elegiac guitar solo. With Venom, Orthodox cover ‘Genocide’ from ‘At War with Satan’, which is an odd choice. It certainly shows that Orthodox can do fast when they put their minds to it but, for that very reason, it seems to be from a different album altogether. The pounding, metronomic drum and clean guitar solo are at odds with the flourishes and distortion so characteristic of the rest of ‘Gran Poder’. The band are clearly letting their hair down but the slightly ragged performance is a jarring way to close such a claustrophobic album and, indeed, in a recent interview bassist Marco Serrato Gallardo casually dismissed it as “fun” and explained it was Southern Lord’s decision to include it. ‘Black Sabbath’ complements the oppressive atmosphere of ‘Gran Poder’ but ‘Genocide’ might have been better left off. It is probably best to regard the album proper ending with ‘El Lamento del Cabrón’ (The Lament of the Bastard’). After a characteristically slow opening, in which lumbering heavy chords effectively contrast with a skittering, light drum that speeds the rhythm along beneath, the middle section sees Orthodox spread themselves into far rockier territory than previously, with a fast, bluesy riff and a mid-1970’s feel. ‘El Lamento del Cabrón’ is packed with constantly shifting elements but overall it possibly ends up rather less than the sum of its parts compared to the epic simplicity of ‘Geryon’s Throne’. The final shift sees a return to long drawn-out chords, stretched to yawning gaps of drone, and repeated over and over. Although initially effective after the more frenetic part of the track, it is possibly a little overdone (lasting more than 7 minutes), not to say too familiar from other doom bands, and dissipates much of the tension built up over ‘Gran Poder’, although it recovers right at the close with eerie, skeletal piano chords picked out amidst the droning. The production on ‘Gran Poder’ is excellent, characterised by the rough, loose-stringed guitars with their perpetual reverb but nonetheless clear and well balanced, the distant vocals obviously an intended effect rather than a shortcoming. The echo and distortion on the guitars and vocals contrast effectively with the sharp, punchy drums, always heavy on cymbal. ‘Gran Poder’ was recorded and mixed across a mere 2 days in Seville and that is reflected in the tight focus of its music and its sense of place. Orthodox have talked in interviews about how the music of Seville and Semana Santa “is, for us, a reason for pride and a great source of inspiration” and, in ‘Gran Poder’, they have created a magnificently powerful doom metal interpretation of the city and its greatest spectacle. |
| Gran Poder: album of great power - 90% |
| Written by NausikaDalazBlindaz
on January 23rd, 2007
|
| This is a great debut album: majestic and beautiful yet stern and austere. The music is steeped in the history and culture of Andalusia in southern Spain and throughout the album there is a heavy and sinister authoritarian presence which may refer to the power that the Roman Catholic Church once held in this country. Opening track "Geryon's Throne", which recalls the ancient Greek legend in which the hero Herakles (or Hercules) travelled to ancient Iberia to capture the cattle of three-headed Geryon, takes up over half the album and is a splendid exercise in building dread and suspense through the relentless repetition of guitar riffs upon guitar riffs. The style is minimalist and the production is fairly clean which together help to create that odd ambience of oppressive stillness such as what you might experience in the middle of summer in a place so close to the Sahara desert in northern Africa. The singing seems quite pained and tremulous as if the vocalist was feeling a great pressure or burden on him. The song builds up for a long time, reaches a plateau with heaving, grating guitar noises and percussion tittering in anticipation of a momentous auto-da-fe, then everything comes to a climax in a flurry of drumming and vibrating guitar, and bursts into frenzied jamming. Way to go! After this epic piece, the rest of the album is a footnote but not a bad one: second track "Arrodillate ante la madera y la piedra" features hyperactive improvised drumming against a never-ending series of long guitar drones that seem off-key (or maybe the bassist is trying not to be in tune). Again the vocalist sings like one condemned to die a heretic's death. There's a brief passage of riffing that might remind some listeners of Black Sabbath. "Oficio de tinieblas" is a brief duet in waltz time of drum and piano. Anyone expecting to hear flamenco? - none here unfortunately. (I bear Orthodox actually do perform live with a female flamenco dancer.) This short track passes quickly into "El lamento del cabron" which compared with the rest of this album is quite fast and is as close as the trio gets to rocking out. Stoner metal and psychedelic influences are present though you could say that in its own distinctive way the whole album with its air of tension and sense of a silent and remote presence demanding loyalty and obedience is psychedelic. At this point, "silent" is a very appropriate description as "El lamento ..." features a long coda in which long moments of silence are interspersed with music as though the musicians were fearfully acknowledging the sinister invisible being that is much greater than they or any of us are. Though the trio sticks strictly to just guitars, drums and the occasional piano and they have a clean sound, Orthodox really do make you feel there is a power close by observing and making note of your every move and thought. The music can be long and arduous but it is well crafted and builds up suspense and tension which the band can either release all at once or very slowly, prolonging the listener's emotional agony. Proof that you do not necessarily need fancy special effects or lots of studio technology trickery to create a recording with a heavy atmosphere and mood. How seriously these guys take themselves is another matter; photos of these guys show them wearing long black robes with Ku Klux Klan-style hoods and nooses around their necks so they must be pretty serious about their music at least! At this time of writing "Gran Poder" was a self-released album and might have been hard to get outside Europe (though I was able to get a copy on import) but good news for North American doom metal folks is that Southern Lord will be releasing a new version of the album with an extra track some time in 2007. |