Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light

The Body and Full of Hell are two of my favorite bands. They’re incredibly prolific experimental metal/noise musicians that collaborate all over the place. Ascending A Mountain Of Heavy Light is their second joint album. Their first, 2016’s One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache, is fucking great.

Ascending doesn’t really feel like a companion Ache, which featured much more metal, while this one is far more focused on electronics and drums. It heavily utilizes multiple channels, fades, and white noise to build a very absorbing sound. Several parts of the record take influence from pop and dance music. Coupled with drones, buzzes, and screams I find it very soothing and engaging despite its chaotic sound.

The individual tracks range in style but are mostly unified by The Body's pervasive sense of despair and loathing, with the cacophonous fury of Full of Hell complementing it nicely. Light Penetrates, the first track, features noise mixed nicely with a good beat and ends in an atonal, arrhythmic instrumental from a very broken-sounding saxophone. Track 2, Earth Is A Cage, is the most similar to the material on the previous album. Waves of washed out, oscillating noise dominate and guitars and drums stab in at points in a wall of sound. It feels like a group accustomed to playing together, improvising and sharing space in a way that only seasoned musicians comfortable with their sounds and able to shift on a dime can. The next track, The King Laid Bare, is a great example of the mixing and sound tweaking I was referring to: drum parts alternate between channels with each beat, forming disorienting and fascinating patterns. Didn’t The Night End, track 4, is the tightest, most focused track on the album. It's industrial-inspired with some truly impressive sound layering- disaster sirens, drones, a ridiculously heavy programmed drum beat, and Full Of Hell's drums added on top form a heavy, hellish sound. It's not only a new sound for both bands but some of the most addictive industrial music I’ve heard in a long time.

Side B begins with my least favorite track, Our Love Conducted With Shields Aloft. A desolate, washed out track covered in static, with the vocals chopped and muted in ways that make them hard to latch on to. It's kept somewhat interesting by virtuosic jazz-style drumming on top of the track, adding more energy to an otherwise stripped down, noise-laden ensemble. Master’s Story is poppy, with a beat that sounds like a club track. The beat is straight up addictive, yet mixes this with heavy sludge-doom guitars and a hard industrial edge, and ending in harsh electronic noise. I love this track. I could listen to a whole album of this type of music.

The last two tracks feel like companions to one another. Farewell, Man is built on a heavy drone, enormous drums, and crushing reverb. Finally, the closer I Did Not Want To Love You So builds on Farewell, Man's juggernaut pace to form what does indeed sound like an ascent up a mountain: a journey full of pain and adversity, a commitment to pushing past suffering with the knowledge that only more of the same will follow. As it reaches the peak it ends abruptly, leaving a feeling of uncertainty. It doesn’t feel like a proper ending, more like an anticlimax. This much agony and hatred, while sometimes laced with catharsis, does not end tidily or pleasurably.

While I enjoy the album, there are a few things keeping me from loving it unreservedly. It feels incohesive. Light Penetrates (track 1) and Our Love Conducted With Shields Aloft (track 5) hold it back, with the noise elements (and that damn saxophone, which feels out of place if only because it only appears once on the album) feeling too dominant and Full Of Hell’s instrumentation feeling too absent. Not only that, but these tracks come at crucial points: the openings of both sides of the album, where they should establish a tone but instead feel like outliers. It’s just enough to drag it down from the heights it could have achieved. Overall, though, Ascending A Mountain Of Heavy Light is still impressive. Check it out.

Man, this is such a difficult album to talk about. I’m sure that’s what Full of Hell and The Body intended. The album is decidedly weird, with flittering electronics and glitchy drum beats being just as common as crawling sludge riffs. Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light is a world away from the spastic power violence I saw from Full of Hell at a sweaty basement show.

With opener “Light Penetrates”, it quickly comes apparent that this is going to be a weird trip. Dazed psychedelic electronics start the album, which a droney sludge riffs eventually crawls over. At the end some weird-ass free jazz squeaking joins the fold. “King Laid Bare” has a weird hi-hat drum machine pattern that sounds like trap music on a bad acid trip. “Our Love Conducted with Shields Aloft” goes from weird drone track to wigged-out sound collage. Even the comparatively straightforward droning sludge of “Master’s Story” has an off-kilter funky drum loop in it. Needless to say, this is not a normal album. The two bands’ previous collaboration One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache was surely fairly out there, but it doesn’t have shit on Ascending. It was grounded by a relentlessly nihilistic aesthetic and (again, comparatively) cohesive song structure. Ascending breaks the tether and goes balls deep into extraterrestrial territory.

It’s honestly hard to say if I like Ascending or not. I’m not even sure it’s an album intended to be enjoyed in the normal sense. I find the experimentation interesting at times, but grating at other times. I do have to admit I liked the more “normal” songs like “Didn’t the Night End” and “Master’s Story” the best. Riffwise, Ascending is more or less a particularly droney sludge album. As much as I love sludge, some more powerviolence/hardcore would have been nice to change up the tempo (asides from the often ill-fitting drum loops). One thing besides the unrelenting experimentation I find a bit grating are the vocals. They are mostly handled by the dude from The Body, and to be quite honest, I really hate his style. His vocals are like particularly black metal rasps with all the distortion taken out of the voice. These yelps are unfortunately comparable to the vocal style often used in bedroom DSBM projects.

At the end of the day, it’s hard to know what to even say about this. It’s probably a worthwhile album even if it’s intentionally difficult and often sees to jolt from one experiment to another without any real regard for song structure. While taking risks like this is ultimately a good thing for developing new ideas and stumbling upon happy accidents, this doesn’t click with me the way their other collab does. What I will say is it’s better to take a leap and go balls deep in wild experimentation than it is to make a stagnant going-through-the-motions type album.