Review Summary: Avant-garde rock at its best. An album that is equal parts beautiful and disturbing. Their best album and easily one of the most creative albums in the last decade....
‘Of Natural History’ is a highly engrossing experience that is not easily put into words. Imagine it is the ‘Grapes of Wrath’ dust-bowl era. You are in California driving down empty stretches of highway through the unforgiving desert. It is hot, it is sticky, and you have been going for hours with no destination in sight. You come across a caravan of carnival wagons pulled off on the side of the road. It is a spectacle filled with side-show act circus freaks and oddities that seem like they are right where they belong……in the desert, on the fringes of civilized society, performing their acts for anyone willing to stop and watch.
This is an album, created by an ensemble of degree-toting, professional musicians, working on the periphery of modern music, who created something wholly unique and gratifying for those who ‘get it’. Using those two words, ‘get it’, is not something meant in a derogatory way, rather, expressing that the music on this album is not going to be for everyone and there is unquestionably a target audience. There is no easy A-B comparison, but much like Mr. Bungle, there will be people that see this as genius and those that dismiss it as avant-garde rubbish.
The music is oppressive, using field recordings of flies buzzing about, dogs growling, and stringed instruments droning, it is an extremely dark album. It is heavy in the sense that there are complex time signatures, aggressive vocals, and dark lyrics. It is metal album, much in the sense, that King Crimson’s ‘Red’ is a metal album, it is the mood, the tone, the overall vibe; it is not due to dropped down guitar tunings, crushing drums, or aggressive sounding production. They created the album in way that unfolds for the listener as if they are listening to the sounds of the impending apocalypse.
Using a plethora of homemade instruments (too long to list here) they have songs comprised with a base of traditional instruments (guitar, bass, drums, violin) and then fill the songs full of their other-worldly sounds. What is truly magnificent is that all the ‘sounds’ on the album are from these handcrafted instruments and not traditional synthesizers. The album opens with ‘A Hymn to the Morning Star’ which sounds like it could have been lifted from a deranged Disney soundtrack. The deep baritone voice cutting through the tender ‘oohs and aahs’ and gentle music backdrop is a brilliant opener. The lyrical content, much like a progressive rock album, is explored in full throughout the album. Most of it could be considered ‘Satanist’ or simply ‘nihilistic’ with themes on the failure of religion, society, and humanity as a whole. However dark and brooding, they seem to keep the lyrical content somewhat intelligent and it never falls into ridiculous category that so much of metal in general does.
The music bounces around from song to song, constantly evolving, and so many styles are sampled in the songs without ever straying from the inclusive tone of the album. Without ever sounding pretentious, they reference everything from rock to pop to country, all profoundly veiled in their own unique breed of avant-garde rock. The 2nd track ‘The Donkey-Headed Adversary of Humanity Opens the Discussion’ could be considered the most straightforward rock track on the album, if there truly is one. The 3rd track, ‘Phthisis’ starts out very rhythmically heavy with the female vocalist in the band carrying the lead. In stark contrast to the baritone of the male lead, she actually sounds a lot like Bjork, tonally. The two singers seem to bounce back and forth throughout the album, both sharing lead vocal duties, and both doing background harmonies in every song. On a final note, the 5th track, ‘FC-the Freedom Club’, is the absolute highlight of this album. The song opens up with both singers harmonizing together, singing over a gentle musical backdrop with perhaps the most accessible melody found on the album, only to develop into an extremely aggressive track and then come full circle back to the quiet opening melody.
This album is a masterpiece for those who enjoy the style. There are truly no easy comparisons to this band and if you enjoy obscure musical styles or are looking for something different you should give this album a chance. ‘Of Natural History’ is full haunting vocal melodies, strangely tuneful musical arrangements (considering their style of composition), and it is completely engrossing. If you go to this album looking for a track to latch onto or a ‘single’ you may walk away disappointed. There is a theme that runs through each track, tying one song to another, it is meant to be taken in as a whole. But as Levar Burton said ‘don’t take my word for it’…
