Review Summary: Ceaselessly.
“Aeviternity” describes a state that Christian scholasticism attributes to both saints and angels. It defines their interstitial relationship with time – they are neither eternal (as only God can be) nor mortal (prey to the vices and failures of flesh), and this concept raises a number of interesting philosophical questions. Which lower urges of the body can a saint transcend? Which elements of the mundane can an angel’s divinity never exceed? This liminal space is the core of
The Ailing Façade; it uses this Aeviterne state to represent the unresolvable dread with which the modern world wrestles. We are suspended, helplessly, between the urges of our body and the comprehension of their insignificance, between an unsustainable reality and a horrifying dependence upon it.
What’s gripping about
The Ailing Façade is how comprehensively it goes about crafting this atmosphere. It sheds the staples of tech-death disorientation – illegible leading lines, whipcrack metric shifts – and opts instead to unnerve the listener with sheer drama. Technicality is vital in achieving this, but masterfully subdued. The chromatic, crawling runs of opener ‘Denature’ are laden in doomy groove; the intricate, roiling percussion of ‘Still the Hollows’ Sway’ floats ominously amid a few clean guitar notes; the title track’s pensive build meanders to a futile, droning end. In all cases,
The Ailing Façade shades its dissonance with ominous purpose.
Most poignant are its subtle industrial aesthetics. A derelict buzz drives (and outlasts) the climax of ‘Penitent’, and ‘The Gaunt Sky’ offsets its eerie refrain with the shuddering of distant automation. These elements evoke processes beyond even the album’s dismal scope, forces that will continue whirring and ticking even after Aeviterne is no longer there to accompany them. This sense of bleak perpetuity defines the work, but it also serves as an essential contrast to some of
Ailing Façade’s most vital moments. ‘The Reeking Suns’ rises to a grandiose, almost post-rock peak (amid howls of “Ceaselessly! Ceaselessly!”) before being choked out in soft static. ‘Dream in Lies’, keening and resolute, closes the album with a vigor that only enhances its final, inexorable fade to silence.
For a record rooted so firmly in duality, perhaps the
The Ailing Façade’s most pervasive triumph is its production. Vocals lash the groove with full-throated furor, each fresh abrasion both an exhortation and a wretched gasp. Guitar lines are shrouded in dynamic, palpable murk, abetted by the rough shiver of bass and the visceral punch of the kit. The mechanical and macabre have ample space to lurk.
There’s space, too, for the Aeviterne, suspended between discord and design, between the endless and the transient.
The Ailing Façade renders this in abrasive bombast, brooding drone, and the oscillation that relates them. There is no hierarchy to transcend. For all our struggle, sentience is merely our sentence.
