Album Review: Daxma - Unmarked Boxes
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
When you name your band after the Zoroastrian term for a funeral temple – pronounced Dock-Ma – and base your first couple of EPs around ideas of loss and longing; and then writing the first full album about the soul’s journey from birth to death, taking the philosophical musings of Hegel and Kierkegaard as inspiration, you set yourself a pretty high bar to clear for album number 2.
Daxma, then, have decided to turn to the thirteenth century and the poetry of Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī, the Persian philosopher-poet, whose short work, Unmarked Boxes, allows the band to further explore its themes of the cyclical nature of life.
The final two tracks on the album are titled directly from a line in the works opening stanza. Anything You Lose is a slow and deliberately gothic mixture of the fragile and the devastatingly harsh. Its use of the Doom Death genre allows the band to sensitively explore the idea of the inevitability of loss as a natural process of life, setting it against the lush melody, further enhanced by Jessica T’s mournful violin.
Its partner track, Comes Back in Another Form completes Rumi’s line, but now the Gothic melancholy of the previous track has been replaced by the more modern Post Metal; the moments of quiet reflection allowed in this track are few and far between and are regularly disturbed by searing guitar lines and incessant drum. The idea of the Return is further enhanced by the repetitive nature of the riff, that circles around, slightly different each time, but ostensibly the same.
In mixing Doom Death with Post Metal Daxma is able to use the most emotive styles of extreme music and fashion it into something that is liable to make you cry, both emotionally and physically. Unmarked Boxes is comprised of four tracks, each exceeding ten minutes each, and two shorter atmospheric passages.
And the Earth Swallowed Our Shadows is an instrumental piece built around a yearning guitar and a morose piano, backed with the unmistakable sound of running water. It’s somehow rougher in its orchestration than its predecessor The Clouds Parted which, like the other epics on the album, is filled with atmospheric introspection, played against either crashing slabs of Post Metal Doom or delicate passages of sorrow.
The poem which inspired the album is a consideration of the inevitability of life in flux, but also of the possibilities of the dream life, through which the soul can fly free during sleeping hours and this oppositional stance is reflected in Daxma’s musical vision. One moment devastatingly heavy, the next delicately fragile, Unmarked Boxes never feels like a contradiction, rather a blending of musical ideas with a clear goal in mind.
Half a dozen songs in a little short of an hour and based on or around thirteenth century Persian poetry does not, on the face of it, seem like everyone’s idea of party time; but such is Daxma’s mastery of their material that the weight of the music and the theme never feels to drag the album down.
Instead, Unmarked Boxes is a refreshingly heartfelt record that uses the heaviest of music to ably explore its ideas. Where Daxma will find inspiration for album number three is known only unto them; though don’t be surprised if it’s a concept album tackling the idea of Deconstructive Post-Modernism as proposed by Jacques Derrida.
