Promo 2005

So the story goes that Kim “Carlsson and Jonas “B” Bergqvist got together, self-harmed, and then did some lengthy guitar improvisations with a lot of delay and reverb, which resulted in this demo, and to be honest that’s what it really sounds like. If you’re looking for the melancholic, industrial tinged Lifelover that would appear a year later, you’ve come to the wrong place. This demo isn’t bad per say, it’s just worlds away from the direction that the band would go in on ‘Pulver’.

‘Promo’ is still very depressive, but its approach to evoking such feelings is quite different. Kim described the two tracks as “improvised misery”, and to be honest, that’s probably the best way to put it. There’s no real riffs or melodies to speak of, there’s just these atonal, off kilter sounds that creep up on you. There’s no crescendos, or grand musical gestures, just this overarching feeling of hopelessness. Lifelover would come to sound quite bipolar on their later releases, but here they conjure up a feeling of lethargy, and malaise, which is assisted by the length of each track as it just continues, showing little signs of change, weighing down on the listener.

There’s not really a lot more to say about this demo. It is exactly what it’s described as, and I can’t fault it in that regard. It does feel like a natural progression from Kim’s other band Hypothermia, and if they did continue in this vein I guess it would’ve made sense, but even though I enjoyed this demo, I’m very glad that they did decide to go in the radically different direction that they did with ‘Pulver’. I can see quite a lot of Lifelover fans being turned off by this, but I’d still recommend giving it a listen as it’s still quite interesting to hear how the collaboration between “( )” and “B” started. However, I can only really see fans of different forms of ambient music, and possibly Hypothermia really enjoying both of these lengthy tracks.

“Promo” is the first Lifelover recording out of six. Originally released in 2005 as a demo in few copies on tape, it was then re-issued on CD coupled with some re-releases of Lifelover’s third full-length, “Konkurs”.

I will just start by saying that as much as I love Lifelover, which is to me by far one of the best bands in the last decades, this “Promo” is absolutely unhearable, uninspired and ridiculously boring. Nothing of the future Lifelover is present here: no catchy guitar melodies, no piano tunes, no drum machines, almost no voice at all - only more than 50 minutes of something that could be probably called "ambient", but so repetitive and minimal that it is not believable that this is the same Lifelover which released true masterpieces between 2006 and 2011.

Actually, also for what concerns the line-up this is "another" Lifelover: on this "Promo" in fact we have only B and ( ) playing everything. The demo itself is composed by two songs lasting about 25 minutes each, unoriginally called I and II, pretty similar in the structure: extremely repetitive, slow and dark ambient effects with some occasional "different", faster and "higher" melodies and guitar pieces, such as after some minutes in II, which unfortunately stops after a while only to plunge another time into that senseless weird and eerie effects in the background.

II also presents, after some 17 minutes of pure boredom, ( )'s vocals, in the form of some sick screams which actually are, another time, pretty different from anything he will record on the "true" Lifelover tracks; anyways, even these screams end too early, and then we are supposed to hear another eight minutes of two slow notes repeated over and over. Actually, also I features some shrieks, but lower and even more immersed into the usual boring background music that they do not even sound as real human vocals. Towards the end of the song we have fortunately some "different" electric guitar melodies, but they - another time - add little or nothing to the absolute boredom of the whole track.

In the end, this is something completely different from the rest of the Lifelover discography, which is extremely varied and brilliant, presenting different vocal styles and brilliant guitar and piano melodies; moreover this is no metal at all, and if this could be defined as "ambient" music, it is surely a pretty boring and uninspired kind of ambient. It's actually hard to write about Lifelover's "Promo", since it seems that they are repeating those two or three ambient effects over and over again for an insanely long amount of time; there is no melody, no innovation, no lyrics, no emotionality at all - only cold, minimal, boring music. To love this album, or even to manage to listen entirely to it, you should probably be a die-hard fan of dark, ambient and terribly repetitive music; if you are a Lifelover fan like me, you will not find anything of their trademark sound on here. Fortunately, their "ambient" experiments have come and gone in 2005.

Exposure to Lifelover's initial 2005 promo recording comes in two forms: either you've downloaded it to check it out, or you purchased the limited edition Konkurs though Avantgarde which included the material, since the original cassettes must be almost impossible to locate at this time. Either way, it is important to note that this is not the same bizarre metal band who would release their debut Pulver in the following year. Sure, it's got two of the same members, ( ) and B, and it's called Lifelover (with a different logo), but this is an ambient recording using ringing and brooding guitar feedback broken up by only the occasional screamed vocal. Whether this was an intended direction for the band and they shifted to their later, melodic black/rock style, or there was some implicit duality in their goals to release both ambient and metallic works (certainly others, like Vinterriket have done such a thing), this is simply not the same Lifelover sound that would survive to transform the band into cult favorites.

The kicker is, this was actually enjoyable material, and it would have proven interesting had they pursued this course, even though we might never have been gifted with an Erotik or a Konkurs. Obviously we're reaching into an entirely different realm of experimentation, since you won't find the tinny drum machine, the swaggering, almost drunken rasping chaos of ( ), or the surge of Katatonia-styled guitars that provide the undercurrent for their modern work. Instead, the duo channels Brian Eno through two lengthy, untitled compositions in over 53 minutes. "I" is the longer of these, providing resonant walls of string feedback given both warm and eerie tones as the occasional vocal snippet plugs through, building to several crescendos in the middle and climax of the track. "II" opens with the most minimal pause on the album, but the sounds that erupt about 4-5 minutes into this are wonderfully frightening, like the blaring of horns across a mute landscape, shimmering little guitars reaching ghastly fingers of ice through the din. The end is quite warm, like an afternoon in the womb, strange sights and sounds just beyond the realm of the listener's unborn perceptions.

As a pretty huge fan of ambient and dark ambient musics, there was much on this release that appeals to me. Do I find it as distinct as their metal direction? Probably not. There were of course hundreds of artists already afield of large catalogs of such minimal background noise, and while Lifelover were completely capable of making it stick, they're not quite at the level of a Raison d'Etre or Atrium Carceri. Still, if this genre suits you, then there is no reason not to check it out, because it's further evidence of the Swedes' offbeat center, their dimension of detail, their flirtation with the obscure, wringing the cloth of quality for each longing drop.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com