London

I’ll preface everything with; I’ve not heard the first Voices album yet, and it has been a lot of years since I’ve listened to any Akercocke.

Most obviously, there’s a pretty eclectic mix of styles here. It’s overtly progressive, not quite experimental, but firmly rooted in a progressive black/death root. Technical ability meshing into solid black, segueing into death but all working together, so all good stuff. What makes it better in a way is something that normally annoys the cock off me with a lot of other bands and that’s the juxtaposition of the dark and light (Suicide Note and Music for the Recently Bereaved are like comparing dark clouds to a belt-sander, for example). There are elements here of industrial when needed (House of Black Light), but much larger helpings of gothic, even doom in parts, and softer, much more melodic parts with clean vocals. There were some sections, even an entire track or two where you could have told me I was listening to Anathema and I wouldn’t have been able to claim different! And to draw further comparison, you could mean modern, melodic goth Anathema, or their earlier doom/death sound and it could apply equally depending on track. In some hands, this could be seen as derivative, but here it works very well and is different enough to not just be a copy while being good enough to stand on its own merits. But outside the melodic/prog parts, the death/black parts are, well, easy to take. I like death a lot, but black has always been very hit and miss with me, veering from balls-out, epic, punishing awesomeness, to mocking parody of itself. But here, I suspect tempered by the softer sections, it is much easier to listen to and take as part of an overarching tone. Someone more steeped in a puritan black metal background might find it a little vanilla in comparison, but it hits some good notes with me. Very well done, really.

Where this really wins for me, though, is through the tone and narrative. As the title suggests, this is very much an ode to London, but a very bleak, dark view. There have been many songs across a multitude of genres written about home cities, but this could only be London, really. To my stereotypical mind, it’s not violent enough to be Glasgow, not dour enough to be most northern cities, not stylised enough to be any US city etc. And then only London in a specific time and story. There aren’t many cities in the world that can have the elements of dispossession and hopelessness, threat and defensiveness that London can inspire, and that is what is being sought and delivered here, just through the lens of a very few, incomplete characters. Shadows more than persona, like people you would see through the rain streaked windows of night buses as they pass. The sort of bleak, hopeless outlook combined with spasms of violence speak to a dark time for a few in a city like this, and to me seem a fairly close examination of one facet of living unalone yet lonely. Surrounded by 7 million people yet living without direct interaction, or worse, with damaging interaction. But it seems to bookend other albums quite well. To pull from another genre, Kontakt ‘We Move Through Negative Spaces’ seems to be the antithesis for this album. ‘London’ is the evening before, full of empty promise, rain-sodden streets, sideways glances and unspoken threats, dark thoughts and unseen dark deeds. ‘Negative Spaces’ is the morning after, with the rain stopped but streets still wet, reflecting sunrise and potentiating hope.

This leaves me with my only real criticism, and that’s with the development of the tone and the narrative progression, or any coherent binding agent between the threads. A lot of the album seems like a series of snapshots or vignettes, that while visceral leave much of the story untold. Maybe this is the point, but the result leaves me craving some sort of resolution, if not in story then at least the feeling that these people I have been given a glimpse of have actually moved on in time and space and not just remained static sideshows. A planned story arc running through would have utterly ruined the album, so I’m glad they didn’t go there; the narrated intros are enough and quite effective in my opinion, but each snippet of life could have been seen through a slowly shifting viewpoint. Anybody who has spent time in London (prison analogy intended!) but been there under less than ideal circumstances knows the place changes, shifts tone under you depending on time and location. The London of 8pm is a different land to the London of 11pm, and might as well be a different continent to the London of 3am! These shifting moods bring out different people and events, and different ways in which things are seen, and this could have been used. A shift from early violence and viciously bleak outlook to a later, more mundane, desolate view would have given more of a sense of movement and progression through the late London hours. But then while that could be achieved with a simple reordering of tracks, that could also spoil the contrasting styles mentioned earlier. Straight artistic choice there, then? I think I would have preferred the latter, but that’s just me. In its credit, I’ve listened to it twice since yesterday, and I’m itching to go back to it again. That pretty much doesn’t happen to me with albums much anymore, so this is a good sign.

I’d say definitely listen to it. It’s well worth it if you put any predisposition for or against London aside and take it as it’s meant; shit happens, and this is our shit.