Ressentiment

Missouri's one and only micro-tonal experimental black metal act Jute Gyte brings out yet another epic recording of quarter-tone sonic hell-fire on his own label Jeshimoth Entertainment. This album must be the 23rd full-length work JG man Adam Kalmbach has recorded and still no mainstream BM label has signed him up even if only to give itself some credibility, never mind pushing sales of the record so Kalmbach can devote himself full-time to the project if he so wishes and isn't doing so already. As far as I know, "Ressentiment" is the third installment of a trilogy which I presume began with "Discontinuities" and continued with "Vast Chains": these three albums feature reproductions of Renaissance / early 17th century European paintings as their cover art. The paintings chosen - they include the famous "Las Meninas" painting by Diego Velázquez and Jan van Eyck's "The Arnolfini Marriage" - for all three albums possess in their background details mirrors that reflect images of the characters in the art and which might symbolise an other-worldly gaze back at the society that has produced such art and what it values or does not value. As with previous work, Kalmbach's lyrics deal with the emptiness and fragility of life, violence and existential darkness.

Songs are usually very dense affairs, spilling over with several melodies, riffs and tempos, and always featuring Kalmbach's bilious and crabby vocal - but the album as a whole seems lighter and more rock-oriented than the previous "Vast Chains". The tracks have more distinct personalities and a different style of music seems to be emphasised on each: for example, "The Central Fires of Secret Memory" has a fair amount of almost minimal doom metal along with much faster blast-beat passages. Although at first the music appears chaotic, it is actually very structured and orderly - with repeated hearings, listeners will be able to pick up repeating riffs and melodies. The use of micro-tones here gives songs a highly demented spirit, as a way of expressing the apparent madness and futility of living in a world where terrible things happen or humans treat one another badly and brutally for no good reason and in a random manner that defies explanation.

Micro-tones can serve a symbolic function in revealing hidden areas of music that themselves either represent the seamy darkness of our societies which we would prefer not to know or the potentials for reform and transformation that we, deliberately or unconsciously, avoid. Another way of interpreting them is that they represent the free-wheeling chaos of life within which a logic and an order beyond our ability to understand and control exist, and if we become aware of this chaos and learn to live with it without imposing our standards on it, we can become partners with it. Listening to the entire trilogy of JG albums without the lyrics, with the aim of complete immersion in the music, can bring this realisation to the willing and humble listener.

There is greater space within the songs than what I recall of past Jute Gyte releases and this allows for more experimentation with tone, melody and structure than what Kalmbach has done (or been able to do) previously. The result is that this music is relatively accessible compared to previous JG work and if new listeners aren't all that fussed about hearing the entire trilogy, they can certainly start their journey with Jute Gyte with this recording. True, Kalmbach seems to go out of his way to find the ugliest, most awkward and ungainly riffs, melodies and tones to play but those of us who follow him know we do so on his terms: Kalmbach is a true maverick who has always dug his own niche in a particularly dark and bleak area of black metal / industrial that few want to know.

The whole album proceeds like a series of rants and raging screeds though the lyrics of most songs speak more of despair, resignation and sadness at the inevitability of death and the failures and stupidity of humankind. This might say a great deal about how Kalmbach views the world and his determination to keep his distance from it. Perhaps that's why in spite of the epic and unique nature of his music, Jute Gyte has never signed to a BM label that could spread his message far and wide: it's nothing to do with the music at all. It's an expression of Kalmbach's jaundiced view of the sordid and brutal world we have made.

Jute Gyte, the prolific black metal/noise/dark ambient/drone alter ego of Missouri’s Adam Kalmbach, has once again unexpectedly released a new album. Combining black metal riffs with classical compositional techniques and the aggressive skronk of noise rock, Ressentiment incorporates new elements along with the classic Jute Gyte sound to create a defining artistic statement and one of the best albums of the year so far.

From the clanging first notes of “Mansions of Fear, Mansions of Pain”, Kalmbach sets up the listener for a journey through Ressentiment’s seasick, contorting Hell. Opening with a wall of distorted guitars freely sliding around the scale before taking a riffier turn with the introduction of a chugging 5/4 motif that pops up throughout the song. Jute Gyte’s sound has always been characterized by a dichotomous combination of blasting black metal and crashing doom, but Ressentiment introduces a crushing new element of blackened death metal heretofore unheard of in Jute Gyte’s discography.

Still present, of course, are Kalmbach’s trademark twisting leads, reminiscent at times of the spindling, architectural musical constructs of Xenakis or Stockhausen. A welcome surprise, though, are the almost-modal progressions found in the openings of “Oh Soft Embalmer of the Still Midnight” and “Like the Deepening of Frost in the Slow Night”, an interesting divergence from Jute Gyte’s usual discordant approach to harmony that borders on accessible. The moment is fleeting though, and the song develops into a classic Jute Gyte track in no time.

Kalmbach describes Ressentiment himself as “microtonal experimental black metal with four-voice canons, extended technique industrial riffing, polyrhythmic process music, and a final collapse into despondent mise en abyme.” When calling Jute Gyte canonical, it’s important to note that this album is far from the stately works of Bach or Beethoven. The twisting counterpoint of “The Central Fires of Secret Memory” is undoubtedly closer in spirit to Webern or Schoenberg than any pretty Baroque tendencies.

An important note to make, however, is that for all the high-minded pretentiousness this review may have injected into it, Ressentiment is possibly the most emotionally direct album in Jute Gyte’s catalog. Moments like the serpentine clean guitar break in “The Central Fires of Secret Memory” and the chugging riffs of “Your Blood and Soil are Piss and Shit” are given stunning emotional heft by Kalmbach’s gasping snarls.

Though far from Jute Gyte’s shortest songs, “Your Blood…” and “Like the Deepening…” both feel more forthright than much of his other material, though both still manage to pack in more than enough twists and turns to keep them interesting.

“Like the Deepening…” opens with a rush of blast beats and chiming guitars before the walls come crashing down and a (relatively) simple section takes over. The riffs at the end take on a character almost like early Morbid Angel, trudging along at a slow-yet-cacophonous pace before cutting off abruptly in a whirl of high-pitched guitar squeals.

The ringing riffs and expansive walls of sliding harmonized guitars that open “The Grey King” call to mind Sonic Youth by way of Gojira, Kalmbach never sacrificing riff-driven brawn for high-minded brains. For an album chock full of unexpected oddities, the truly off-time drums around the three and eight-and-a-half minute marks, the genuinely frightening howls around the six-and-a-half minute mark and the scraping leads throughout the track all still manage to surprise even after repeated listens.

Though the flawlessly-executed dynamic shifts between migraine-inducing black metal and queasy clean guitar interludes are incredible in their own right, the real star of this album is Kalmbach’s ability to masterfully switch from blasting walls of sound to chugging, visceral death metal riffing without missing a beat. Tempos and time signatures change constantly but in a manner so fluid the listener is left completely unaware without careful listening. In this way, the album is enjoyable both as a “casual” listen and one that merits in-depth analysis.

My one complaint with the album is the production. While the overall mix is fine—the drums, for one, could be louder—and at times complements the music in an unassumingly natural way, the mastering is a bit problematic. While nowhere near as bad as some recent offenders (ahem), the master is still as a whole too loud, and the impact of the sudden switches between loud and soft is blunted. There also appears to be some persistent distortion throughout the album. As a one-man project, though, I can’t fault Kalmbach, and the music is so fantastic I can largely overlook any meager technical errors.

Ressentiment works, ultimately, as one of those rare albums that begins with a bang and manages to sustain its initial momentum all the way to the end with nary a misstep to be found. Though not a “pretty” or “pleasant” album by any means, Kalmbach’s genuinely alien approach to harmony and composition coupled with a greater emotional weight than much of his previous work makes Ressentiment one of his best albums yet, and one of the best this year.

Originally published on the Toilet ov Hell
http://www.toiletovhell.com/review-jute-gyte-ressentiment/

I'd like to afford myself the convenience of dubbing this or any other Jute Gyte album 'fucked up beyond recognition'; only by Adam Kalmbach's standards, Ressentiment is honestly a rather accessible experience, at least as much as anything else he's issued from the heavier half of the project's discography. That's not to say this is safe for family gatherings or airplay at a local retail outlet, but here he's reached a new height of broadening the scope of his dissonant, dramatic composition style to better intertwine the black metallic traits with a flood of caustic (but warmer toned) post-punk or post-rock experimentation which, unlike most of the inoffensive stuff out there on the market to bear that 'brand', actually lives up to the descriptor. The third in what I might incorrectly assume is a triptych of microtonal guitar driven efforts, he puts the technique to excellent use here, in the most unexpected of contexts...catchy songs.

Let me clarify that, since that term might not mean the same to myself as other folks. This is not the soothing, pop-glossed sort of catchy, but droning, oddly ebullient passages of rhythm guitars that ingrain themselves into your conscience, dowsing it in their alien landscape while Kalmbach's bass lines seem to develop themselves along busy, industrious, factory floor lines, and his grainy vocal ravings remain rooted in the black metal tradition he has gone Kafka on, peaking with the passionate howls of "Worms rob the honeycomb..." near the close of "The Grey King" (and the disc). There are other traces of that lineage here, in the form of a few hyper-blasted passages in which the rhythm guitars transform into halos of whirring hornets, but Ressentiment works its best where it remains at a moderate or slower pace, with the jangling guitars or simultaneously driving/laconic chords who seep through that strange microtonal tuning. For instance, he transforms the opener from a surge of disheveled higher pitched warp-riffing to a slower roil accented by these incredibly effective cleaner guitar lines, the whole process sounding like one tragic mistake that turns out...isn't. It's that sense of constant collision between the listener's expectations and the direction he's steering his chord and note progressions which keeps the material constantly fresh and engaging, even if it never hinges upon the consonant comfort zone most rock and metal music dwells within. It's 'art metal', but in a finer sense than just splashes of colorful paint...

Jute Gyte is more like the work of a forgotten master, hanging in the corner of the gallery where most with only a superficial interest in the museum can just ignore it. Sort of like the classics he mines to represent the face of the music. You might also think of this as an Erich Zann transcribed into our shared, non-fictional universe (I know, that's a bold assumption on my part). Every few months, Kalmbach revisits that otherworldly muse which guides him, and commits visions of the unknown and obscured straight to the earspace of those daring enough to loiter about the Rue d'Auseil and experience it. On a base level, Ressentiment is resplendent ugliness set to gnarled, visually stimulating poetry, but the twisted mind can invert it right side up to something of both abstract melancholy and fractured beauty, reactions constantly being generated for me throughout the six tracks and 56 minutes of unhinged escape. Does it go 'off the rails'? Sometimes. Was Jute Gyte ever ON the rails? Oh, no. Ressentiment will prove no surprise to those who have come across and appreciated his previous output, but it retains the project's irreverent relevance in a sea of sameness. This album isn't going to convert the crabcore elite or anyone who drowns his/her blue collar sadness in an Alestorm record, but Jute Gyte remains one of our most creative and challenging American black metal extracts.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com