There’s a certain aura surrounding certain records, one that you either get or don’t, yet if you do you embrace it as a whole to embellish your imagination with its décor. With a record this esoteric, a simple dark night turns into a mystic venture through a silent wasteland. Delusion becomes your sanity, and you feel the music, but nothing more. It is with albums like this that the most intense art is created, just as Wagner or Franz Liszt created the palette of inspiration for their times. What Arcana have done here, aside from finally realizing their full capabilities, is reached out beyond the limits of their genre to paint their own world of specters and firmament apocalypses. Hello top five of 2008!
If you’re at all familiar with their other records, you’ll recognize they’ve kept the middle-eastern influence, but they’re much more in tune with each part instead of encompassing the overall mood, making it a mere characteristic, but in a much better way. What they seem to have done is take in all their sporadic influences and mold them into a format that’s difficult to label. I guess you just have to listen to it now…but there’s still more to discuss.
Right off the bat, some may cry “Dead Can Dance imposters!” and yet if you keep listening you’ll realize Arcana have incorporated much more instrumentation and variety than their idols. The singer’s baritone croon is so autumnal…I could listen to this next to a fire pit for days. Though Peter is the main man of the group, he shares his vocal duties with two femme fatals, Ann-Mari and Ia. Apparently, each vocalist handles their own lyrics, which I found pretty cool as it incorporates three different writing styles that just happen to be sewn together seamlessly. You get your first impressions of them on Invisible Motions, but the song where the female vocals really shine is Autumnal. A loop of a trickling piano melody above steady spurs of wind are greeted by a cello, and eventually a quivering whisper, all echoing together in a subtle crescendo. Chimes, choir ahs, and light synth lines build upon this until the drums collapse the song back to the solo piano line.
As I said before, the mood is quite ethereal. The lyrics are no different. While maintaining that feeling, they are also extremely apocalyptic, and somewhat misanthropic. Here’s an excerpt from Abrakt:
We watched the stars just one last time
As our bodies fell to the ground
Could we have done more or were we committed
Limited by greed
Well, now it's too late for our sons and daughters
Can we look upon ourselves with pride
Now it's too late for the earth to recover
Our guilt we can no longer hide
The lyrical concept of fading away is pertinent throughout the album, yet oddly enough the majority of the album is instrumental, even excluding the 3 instrumental tracks, which all fall into their own rite. The first, Sigh Of Relief, is a almost 3 minutes of a gorgeous requiem solo piano piece. Parisial would be the main middle-eastern structured song. If middle-eastern music was mixed with folk you’d get this song. Another song worth mentioning is Out Of The Grey Ashes, as it contains the ingredients of the album with an apparent Agalloch acoustic section throughout. The female vocals are flawless accents to Peter’s, let alone the music itself. Ann-Mari handles the choir parts over it all as Ia and Peter sing their harmonies.
I am continually surprised by the amount of new darkwave records I’m enjoying. The genre seems to be following a similar structure to post-rock, meaning that there seems to be only so much you can do with the sound, and yet there are a plentiful amount of albums coming out that smash that ideology to pieces. There is, however, a flaw with this album, and it is that there is no definite end to it. This may be due to is composition, but the album seems to just play on until it reaches the end of the world, then falls off instead of a gradual letting go. Granted, if you pay enough attention to the flow of the album you will notice a much grander intensity on the last song, yet since this is darkwave it’s so easy to be spellbound. It’s not even a long record, only 38 minutes; it’s undemanding to have this on repeat for a whole day with that length and the album’s ambiance. Raspail is soaked in sensation, and it makes it even the more alluring, which is too bad considering most people will blow this off to leave it to the handful of people who cherish these bands, or perhaps that makes it just a bit more special.
