Review Summary: Singin' all the nights.
An uninitiated listener might intuit that the genre “space rock” is characterized by stillness and minimalism—the cosmos is a vacuum, after all, mindbogglingly devoid of, well,
anything, at least for distances traversable during a human lifespan. The sheer breadth of our universe is practically incomprehensible, an open secret spinning above our heads that we probably weren’t meant to fully grasp the scale of, lest we boil all our actions on this pale blue dot of a planet down to nihilistic insignificance. Sure enough, the earliest space rock utilized novel technologies, psychedelic substances, space age fashion, and a fascination with ambience over convention to execute one vision of worlds beyond our own and the oceans of pitch black nothing between them.
Then we all got antsy, I guess; if you hear “space rock” and instead call to mind supermassive guitar leads, meticulously dialed-in tones, a predisposition towards the amplifier instead of the synthesizer, and adjectives that share more semantic value with mud than air, Busan-based quartet Baan might be a welcome addition to your regular rotation. These guys keep one foot propped in the doorway to the rest of South Korea’s burgeoning DIY shoegaze movement—Asian Glow even guest-feature on one track here—but their explosive, restless, and hypnotic tweaking of space rock’s modern shape bears more reminiscence and reverence to the genre’s metallically-inclined, free-wheeling pioneers Cave In, Hum, Failure, and ISIS. In their Bandcamp’s own words, Baan is “Doom but not boring,” “screamo but not crying,” “hardcore but not macho,” and “shoegaze but not sucks.” [sic]
Check, check, check, and check! ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴀ ꜰᴇᴡ ᴄᴀᵛᴇᴀᴛs - The band’s latest, second, most complete, and by all means,
only well-recorded album,
neumann, is an asteroid-solid hour of power, far too uptempo and electrified to be reduced to dirgy background music, albeit too uniform in sound to change a skeptic’s mind should the first glimpse not immediately spaghettify their cranium like they veered too close to a black hole. Opening instrumental “Birdperson” and counterpart “Early Bird Dies Fast” establish a template from which the rest of the record effectively refuses to stray, bludgeoning listeners (a compliment, of course) with overdriven guitars, energetic drumming, and seldom emphasized, borderline unintelligible vocal refrains.
Mutations to the blueprint most frequently arrive through free jazz (well, not really. free...rock? free
music? simply
untethered) breakdowns where the group careens every which way before collectively re-calibrating to wind up another wallop. They’re a bit awkward in “Histrionic” and “Reversal of a Man,” but suit the stitched-together trio of “Sing a Brave Song” tracks far better, especially as the album-highlight smackdowns in Parts 1 and 2 play against the rousing gang chorus attained by Part 3. The aforementioned Asian Glow cameo in closer “Oldman” exemplifies the comparatively small dose of emo DNA that permeates the preceding pieces in a less on-the-nose fashion, tinting the riff-centric formula instead of trying to usurp it. There’s still enough passion for their shouting to feel unabashedly human and aptly cathartic; while the English lyrics across
neumann rarely bluff into outright
elegance, their self-questioning is at once beyond language and comfortably subservient to the agitated frequencies they wade through.
What use is there in discourse when it comes to the great beyond, anyway? In November 1974, mankind sent the Arecibo message, a string of binary, from a satellite dish in Puerto Rico towards the constellation Hercules. Its one-time transmission sought not to elicit conversation with hypothetical extraterrestrials, but to prove to any intercepting civilization that we here on Earth have a basic understanding of the science which governs our existence. No response yet, naturally. It’s all in service of wishful thinking, though; “the void is empty vastness” may disproportionately reflect our physical reality, but from our terrestrial vantage point, the billions of light years squashed into our unpolluted night sky posit a more dazzling, less hollow way to enjoy feeling minuscule.
Neumann’s incessant weight stokes the same sense of awe, and like the four receivers depicted on its cover, angled up to audiences worlds away, Baan find their footing, commit to position, and stand ready, waiting for a response to say, “nice job. You’ve got it.” Here goes nothing.
