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.