Pessimistic Reveries

So, you just got done listening to Kestrel's Weather Eye on YouTube again. You look on Discogs to see if you can get a copy of it, since the label is long sold out. To your surprise, there are not only copies available, but also copies of a new tape, Pessimistic Reveries! You hadn't heard about this tape, probably because it was independently released rather than through CW Productions. You buy it eagerly, curious to hear how the band's sound has expanded since the Weather Eye days. If this sounds familiar, it's because you are me circa 2015, and for that I am sorry. Sorry partially because 2015 was an awful time to be me, but also this tape is about to destroy any predictions you had made about what the hell is going on with Kestrel.

Weather Eye felt like a coherent, single artistic work, strange as that work was, but Pessimistic Reveries is definitely more like a random collection of crap from a storage warehouse. None of the four tracks sound alike in mood or production, all but the last one feel unfinished, and the musical quality is all over the place. There's no easy way to summarize them, so a short description of each will have to suffice. "Malheur", French for "misfortune" but more likely named after a river in Oregon that this guy has likely been to, is a sloppy raw instrumental with ominous riffs played on piercingly sharp guitars, mirroring some of the earlier Cirrhus material. There's an interesting riff in the song based around a bright little tremolo lick that pierces through the rough chords, but for the most part, the song's structure is decent at best and is hampered by the dry production and off-time playing.

Just as that song ends and you're left a bit wanting for the finished version, you're suddenly slapped in the face with "SS433 (1st version)" and "Malheur" may as well be fucking Immortal by comparison. This track is perhaps the only CW Productions-related song to date that I can confidently say is just flat-out bad. The distortion here isn't even high enough for surf rock, let alone black metal, leaving the potentially interesting high-string tremolo riffs sounding like a guitar version of Tiny Tim's voice. Throughout, the extremely tinny drums helplessly flail tempolessly against the background of the struggling instruments. Again, no vocals which could distract from the starkness of this goofy mess. When CW Productions hints from time to time that their released material is only a fraction of what they've actually made, a part of me sometimes wonders if the rest of it sounds like this track, and I don't feel so bad about missing out on it. The drone remix "SS433 (Wormhole)" is up next, and it just sounds like they took the raw guitar track and ran it through 500 synth filters until it was unrecognizable. Better than the previous iteration, but not especially interesting as a standalone piece.

The final track "Feast of Janus" is the longest track, and fortunately the best. It's a great song, valuable on its own without any additional qualification. Similar to the intro and outro of Weather Eye, this is an antiquated-sounding, synth-driven, multi-layered ambient/neoclassical piece with a surprising amount of depth. This is much slower and introspective than those Broadway score-ish tracks, though, with a single repetitive set of chord progressions in C# major for 9 minutes. Some field recordings of birds and frogs peacefully chirp and croak away in the background, lending a similarity to Lykathea Aflame's "Walking in the Garden of Ma'at". Although the track doesn't develop at all, the minimalism works to great effect in this case, creating an angelic, calming soundscape that's right up there with some of the best ambient I've ever heard, especially from somebody who makes metal (metal artist ambient tends to really suck). It even almost makes me forget that the rest of the tape's material is mostly nonsense. Hats off to this song.

So although technically half of the length of Pessimistic Reveries is great, the first three of the release's four ideas are mediocre, fucking terrible, and an unremarkable dud, respectively. This strikes me pretty clearly as a tape meant to scrounge up unused material and crap it out regardless of quality, a "throw shit on the wall and hope it sticks"-type release without any cohesive vision or planning. Maybe CW declined to release it on his own label for that reason? Worth physically purchasing to get the last track with the proper augmenting tape hiss, but for absolutely nothing else.