Autopergamene

"Autopergamene" is based around an interesting concept of wanting to be as close and intimate to your soul-mate as possible yet at the same time as you both draw nearer the closeness brings pain, agony and possibly and ultimately death for both. You can't bear to be away from each other but you can't bear each other's company either. Love, intimacy and oneness of flesh and soul equal agony and loss of individual physical, mental and spiritual identity. This is an idea that Nadja return to time and time again and you wonder whether the duo recognise the irony in their obsession with that subject. There's still a lot of power and creative potential there but every time Nadja keep flogging that idea, it loses its potency simply because it's a familiar idea and the day when Nadja have milked it for all it's worth yet still want to squeeze it dry draws ever closer. It's a fatal symbiosis.

"You Write My Name in My Skin" is a strangely eerie and beautiful track of near-orchestral post-rock / noise metal / ambient: the first half of the piece is a slow warm-up of knife-sharp guitar and chamber music keening that about the half-way mark erupts into familiar Nadja jagged guitar-noise / drone solemnity, going over and over while high-pitched glacial violin (or something very like it) passes in and out in a mournful funk. There is a graceful elegiac feeling about the whole track as acid guitar-noise showers rain down and soaks the atmosphere and the ground around the listener. As the track progresses, layers of sonic texture are added, bulking up the music into something quite dense and majestic, and creating much listener anticipation that something stupendous, uplifting, heart-rending and most of all BIG might happen. Uh, hmm, expectation is dashed there.

"You Write My Name in My Head" is standard Nadja: heavy noisy guitar droning with a lot of distortion, repetitive, heavily layered and with whispered vocals buried deep in the churning mix. This time the singing is blurry and almost merges with the music: it's reminiscent of the distorted, blurred sandpaper voices of Njiqahdda except those were clearer and a lot more agonised. The bombastic proceedings march on and on ... but with no destination in sight: the song turns out to be something of a relentless bore.

"You Write My Name in Your Blood" is a return to the style of " ... in My Skin": it begins with delicate solo piano in a sombre atmosphere to which violins and cello are added to create a soothing yet wide-ranging and quite spacious sea of improvised string ramble. The track explodes slowly and gracefully into seething guitar feedback noise buzz across which extended drones roll out like waves washing and racing over a sea of smooth glass that runs and runs for hundreds of miles around. The mood is serene and restful in spite of the continuous sandstorm buzz, the washes of sharp guitar and high keening drones, and the growing intensity of the layered sound textures. Treated violin and cello sounds can be fierce and threatening in their intensely bland sound and volume. Late in the track when the music dies down to flickers spoken and sung vocals arise tentatively and quietly, and the track continues for several minutes in this way, ending in a series of very quiet and fading chants of life-sapping, sanguinary symbiosis.

At least the album is inspired in a sense: combining elements of a string quartet with the Nadja template of repetitive looping guitar feedback drone noise was something Nadja fans probably hadn't anticipated their heroes doing but apart from that, once listeners accept the fusion the music settles into its usual repeating loop routine. The whispery vocals are much the same as they are on other Nadja albums I've heard: yearning for unity or release, wistful, plaintive, never satisfied. It seems that no matter what Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff do with Nadja, they end up slipping back into their old familiar groove. Can't they take a leaf out of Sunn0)))'s book and line up with some guest musicians who can inject some new ideas, show them a new approach in making guitar noise drone, break up the old Nadja template, toss it into the air and make something new out of it?

"This album isn’t terrible by any means, but when you’ve come this far with Nadja, listening to every bit of material along the way, there does come a time when living up to expectations and old standards isn’t enough."

I most emphatically agree with my fellow Nadja-completist Perplexed here. I still thrash a lot of Nadja's past catalog, I still love it, but damn, hearing every new release is starting to get really tiring. It's all sounding the same but slightly worse. The last Nadja releases I genuinely enjoyed was the Black Boned Angel collab and The Bungled and The Botched- those releases are 1 and 2 years old, respectively- but more importantly they're about 10 or so releases old. Aidan has no concept of filler, it seems.

Autopergamene's in that rather average Nadja category of "jam over a drum loop". Blind and deaf Freddy could tell you that the best Nadja is that which has been thoroughly composed; Bodycage, Truth Becomes Death, Thaumogenesis, Desire in Uneasiness, so on and so forth, where layers come in and out, riffs and vocals come and go in a precisely orchestrated fashion. The first two tracks in particular are of this ilk; the first one being an exercise in 'gazey layering and unnecessary length, the second being a fuzzy, "heavy" and rather uninteresting stomp over a Godflesh-y, martial, heard-it-a-million-times-before drum machine.

Things do get sort of better in the final track; initially the build up 'n' fuzz will get you rolling your eyes, until the noise fades and a long ambient fade out, millions of layers, whispered, haunting vocals etc. begins. But the female vocals aside that's been done a million times before. Songs with very similar outros (off the top of my head): Skin Turns to Glass, Memory Leak, Absorbed in You, Bliss Torn From Emptiness, Stays Demons, Thaumogenesis. Ok Aidan, you're good at pro tools. You like time stretching guitars. That's cool bro, we get it.

Personally, I think Nadja would be better off if they'd reign their instincts to release *everything* in a bit and stick to one album a year. Or one album every 6 months, even. I'd normally say this album's for "completists only" but hell, even I found it really boring. No one needs it.

To me, 2009 seemed like a subdued year for Nadja when, in actual fact, the Canadian duo of Aidan and Leah released five full-length albums and countless other pieces of material. Perhaps it was the slow nature of the year that made it seem so quiet on the Nadja front? It took Nadja a few months to get into their usual stride and, with the release of the cover album ‘When I See the Sun Always Shines on TV’, I cannot help but feel that 2009 was a bit of a let down. Aside from ‘Belles Betes’, which was actually a re-release of some of Aidan’s solo work, 2009 drew to a close in disappointing fashion with the Canadian duo failing to pick up where they left off the previous year. The momentum was something I was expecting to carry them onto greater things last year, but with the culmination of the year coming to an end with another collaboration and the lacklustre ‘Under the Jaguar Sun’, Nadja were suffering from a few niggles that had not affected their game in 2008, a year which saw them release many a hit, including ‘Desire in Uneasiness’ and ‘The Bungled & The Botched’.

So, with 2010 well under way, I was hoping for an onslaught at the beginning of the year but it sadly never came. Nadja had been, once again, rather subdued up until recently. Although the band released their first album in March of this year, it somehow managed to slip under the radar and evade public attention. Regardless of how this happened, I’m again feeling somewhat disappointed at Nadja’s efforts to promote their latest material. It used to come out in droves and the public were very aware of it but, nowadays, unless you’re following the band closely, their relations seem to go unnoticed, certainly to me. ‘Autopergamene’ is the first of the 2010 releases that I’ve heard and against my wishes, it seems to have reverted back to the older style. Although I’m fond of Nadja’s old style, with their mammoth distortion and slow build-ups, ‘Autopergamene’ takes things to ridiculous levels. Just as with ‘Radiance of Shadows’, I’ve found it challenging and difficult to get into this full-length. Two of the three songs eclipse the 25 minute mark and the one remaining song isn’t short either.

With a lack of ideas and originality, Nadja seem to be content with churning out the same sorts of material time and again, despite the fact that they’re beginning to sound alike across the board. With the tedious build-up of ‘You Write Your Name in My Skin’ dragging on the 10 minutes, one has to wonder if the tank is running on empty. Aidan and Leah seem to only be able to perform these days when they’re working on collaborative works, as they did with Pyramids. Unless they’re combining their efforts, Nadja are recycling the same compositional sound again and again. I appreciate the earlier works because they’re the originals, the so-called founders of the Nadja sound, but moving into 2010 and with Nadja confined to the same sound as in 2002 and 2003, one has to wonder whether on these collaborative works whether Nadja are being carried over the finishing line, as opposed to running a storming race by themselves. The first song is a calamitous effort and showcases precisely why the band need to move on to new, fresh pastures -- as infrequently explored with the acoustics and ambiance on the final song.

With an introduction that floats aimlessly for around 10, or 11 minutes, the listeners nerves are pushed to breaking point. Although the soft, lulling ambiance is nice to listen to on a dreary afternoon, it doesn’t become any more accessible than good background music, or a soundtrack to sleep to. The insomniac will be cured by the dreamy atmospherics of Nadja, particularly on the opening song which brings together the old classmates and forms a reunion of old sounds. The songs on this particular album do what they’ve always done and though it is a performance Nadja are used to, and good at providing, I cannot help but want more from the ambient drone masterminds. The addition of hazy, low vocals from Aidan is no longer sufficient enough to call experimentation because the ploy has been worked to death on previous albums. The second song, entitled ‘You Write My Name in Your Head’, is guilty of allowing the vocals to become the main experimental force, as Nadja have previously done on a few lowly EP’s. I do appreciate the finer touches, as in the acoustics on the third and final song, ‘You Write Your Name in My Blood’. These do provide a more accessible side to Nadja and would have gone nicely with clean vocals, a la ‘The Bungled & The Botched’. I think this is a side to Nadja that they could expand upon in the future. It’s very reflective, with a hint of sadness in the plucking of the ancient strings.

The vocals aren’t strong enough to steal the show, so we’re once again left with the bare bones of Nadja’s old style which includes ominous atmospherical build-ups and layers upon layers of guitar distortion. The bass doesn’t exist, though the soundscapes are bombastic enough through layers of static to operate fluidly without the bass. The drumming is as its always been. Repetitious, heavy and droning. It is meant to enhance the entrancing qualities of the atmosphere, something the guitars are capable of doing alone. Though I do enjoy the more metallic, droning moments of languid guitar effects and distortion, the vocals detract from songs like ‘You Write My Name in Your Head’ because they’re meant to supply the song with a more sinister sound. Instead they fade into the background and whimper like a feeble animal, cowering from an enormous, powerful predator. The guitars alone need only provide that sinister backdrop which shows that the song writing has taken a bump on the head because it lacks originality, despite being fluid in its projection of dreamy atmospheres and vast space. This album isn’t terrible by any means, but when you’ve come this far with Nadja, listening to every bit of material along the way, there does come a time when living up to expectations and old standards isn’t enough.