Drone, much like Djent, is a wonderfully onomatopoeic genre. Say “droooone” out loud and you get somewhere close to the guitar tone that makes up this subset of noise music. It’s also a rather impenetrable genre, taking vast amounts of time to learn the ins and outs of a band’s oeuvre. Drone isn’t music for casual listeners, it requires dedication. When combined with swirling psychedelia and a deluge of Doom you get Asterismal, the latest album from experimental merchants, 11PARANOIAS.
‘Loss Portal’ opens proceedings in stellar fashion. A quiet bass thuds away before all hell breaks loose as a grinding cyclical guitar riff begins and forms the backbone of the song. The mechanical nature of the instrumentation is almost industrial, infectious in its repetition. The discomfort becomes welcoming and the dissonance becomes loveable. The guitar work of Mike Vest is incredible on this droning, doomy behemoth, spiralling through the exquisite notation he has devised all in sincere love of the riff.
The love of the riff is indeed the centrepiece of an album that forms the third part in a trilogy of structurally conceptual works each utilising a different instrument as the lead player. The prior two albums, Stealing Fire From Heaven and Reliquary For A Dreamed Of World (all Ritual Productions) were drum and bass lead respectively, while this latest offering focuses heavily on guitar. You might imagine that by working most consistently with the traditionally lead instrument would lead to this album being a more standard affair, but you would be wrong. The experimental approach to playing and the genre blending that goes on here is endlessly exciting.
Second track, ‘Bloodless Crush’ has an almost eighties rock gallop to it straight out of NWOBHM, and a persistent pace that keeps the song exhilarating. The Doom of ‘Vitrified Galaxy’ and ‘Slow Moon’ has the crushing heaviness of any Sabbath worship band without straying into imitation, and has the hypnotic repetition of the likes of Sleep. The blistering guitar solo in ‘Slow Moon’ is perhaps the album highlight and is ripped straight from the school book of seventies Blues Rock. It’s a proper guitar hero moment for Vest as you can feel the heat coming from his rapid fingers and his teeth clenching.
It’s not only Vest who is deserving of plaudits, however. Despite this album focusing on the guitar, the instrumentation and adept playing of the bass and percussion is wonderful. They provide a foundation for the rest of the music to grow upon, and things are topped off by the haunting, reverb-heavy vocals of Adam Richardson. There’s a sense of anguish to his vocal performance not dissimilar to Mike Scheidt of Yob, and though it acts as an accent to the music, it has emotionally resonant impact.
A Beautifully stark production lends itself to lo-fi, simplistic playing. Though the instrumentation may not be virtuosic, it soars in its execution as simple but effective. The amalgamation of genres and ideas never gets messy, there are never too many ideas crammed into one space, and the deluge of doom and dissonance combined with cyclical psychedelia makes for a stunning mix.
As experimental as it may be, this album is relatively accessible and may well find 11PARANOIAS a brand new audience, and fingers crossed they get more of the plaudits they deserve.
7 / 10
SAM SAVIGNY