EP Review: Iggor Cavalera / Shane Embury - Neon Gods / Own Your Darkness
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Two titans of the extreme music scene and purveyors of rhythms ungodly, Messrs Cavalera and Embury have been responsible for many of the genre’s most aggressive and forward-thinking extremities unleashed on the world since the Eighties. Not that either man is bringing anything closely resembling what they are most well-known for to this particular table; similarly, anyone having watched the wider careers of both will not be shocked at what they hear on this release.
First track is Iggor’s contribution, closer to his work on Petbrick than anything Sepultura, Cavalera Conspiracy/ Max and Iggor / Cavalera have issued, working with dissonant noises on Neon Gods, offering the kind of unsettling sounds Blut Aus Nord created on their haunting MoRT record.
I find Noise to be a difficult genre to review in a conventional sense; instead, it’s about how the intersection of those noises resonates with me as a listener. In that respect it’s a little like viewing a painting in a gallery, the effect of the piece being uniquely personal to all who engage with it.
For me, Neon Gods evokes a post-apocalyptic wasteland, ravaged by an out-of-control AI, its drones scanning the broken ground in search of dissenting humans. Incessant electronic buzzing of mechanical entities competes with the howling of the wind as it blows through the ruins of civilisation and, at a distance, thunder can be heard.
Such is the scope of the soundscape of Neon Gods that it opens itself up to wherever the listener’s imagination will take them. Are those distant human screams? Is this landscape akin to Gehenna for machines? Who’s is the voice heard at the fifteen-minutes mark?
Running at just short of twenty-minutes, Neon Gods is a brutal sonic nightmare full of creeping, pulsing drones and harsh atmospheric industrial noise, yet trippy and hallucinogenic in equal measure. It is a wholly engrossing collection of sounds, noises and fractured code; the perfect catalyst to set the imagination in motion.
Shane’s contribution, Own Your Darkness, is closer to his work in Dark Sky Burial than the raging grind of Napalm Death and clocks in at hardly fifteen-minutes, but what the track lacks in running time, it more than makes up for in its vast, cosmological scope.
The continuous presence of a single sustained chord anchors Own Your Darkness, over-written by a futuristic buzz, low throbbing pulsations and discordant digital waves that dominate the first half of the composition.
Rumbling and dense Hawkwind-adjacent space rock conjures the colliding of great celestial bodies deep in the void, ominous synths hurl across the vast emptiness like a gamma ray burst about to obliterate everything in its path. It a haunting cry from the depths of the abyss, echoing through the very fabric of space and time itself.
Sketched through droning, ambient synths and a hypnotic low end that rises and falls, ebbs and flows like the passage of time itself, it’s another track from which there is no escape, only submission.
Neon Gods / Own Your Darkness is probably not going to be a party-favourite with most listeners, but a good set of headphones and a willingness to let the sounds carry you away on a flight of imagination, and this split EP could well be a trip you’ll find yourself wanting to take again and again.
Be the first to comment