Whatever you think of their music, it’s hard not to admire a band who wilfully make music as oppressive, uncommercial and solemn as British south-coast trio Esben and the Witch. They’ve been ploughing their unfashionable, gothic furrow for eight whole years. Funereal gloom, however, has limited appeal and they faltered somewhat circa 2014’s Wash The Sins Not Only The Face. Happily, with help from producer Steve Albini, 2014’s A New Nature saw them discover that lamentation can be balanced with dissonant, invigorating noisiness. Older Terrors continues to explore this idea.
For their fourth album, self-produced in their new home of Berlin, Esben and the Witch focus their energy on a canvas of four long-form songs, each coming in at around 10 minutes. Singer Rachel Davies has a strident post-punk banshee howl but her lyrics, like the album’s title, speak of some mystic darkness, and they do have power, pitched somewhere between Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland” and the weirder reveries of the Romantic Poets. “Sylvan”, for instance, sings of a fire immersing all – “Through blackened poles it wafts and wends/Ribbons weaving paths of flame/Yellow ghosts with fervent rage/In circles of an ancient hell” – before letting loose squalls of feedback combustion. Not for nothing is the album partly dedicated to the spooked, phantasmic paintings of early 19th century artists Caspar David Friedrich and John Martin.
The band’s name derives from a dark fairy tale and they revel in tuning into the ancient and, quite probably, abject. “The Wolf’s Sun” speaks of children on fire while “Marking the Heart of a Serpent” trembles “with a bad desire, desperate to pierce, the hungry creature, hissing devil speaker”. Throughout, the music veers between bleak atmospherics and doom-laden explosions of riffage, with the dirge-like tom-tom-led attack at the end of closer, “The Reverist”, being a particular highlight. On it, Davies asks, finally, “I've seen the older terrors, will you come with me?” On this evidence, the answer is, yes, it’s a trip worth taking.
Listen to "Sylvan"
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