MAUDLIN OF THE WELL
Bath (Dark Symphonies)
Leaving Your Body Map (Dark Symphonies)
Not that this is shocking news, but a lot of folks bemoan the state of popular music these days. The sights and sounds of too much plastic, inescapable on the radio and MTV, cause those who think of music as something more than aural wallpaper to despair. However, a bit of scratching on the old surface reveals wonders; it doesn't take much damage to your cuticles to discover whole universes inhabited more gracefully by the Euterpian muse. There are loads of performers out there blazing their own trails to their own internal musical destinations, with no care of how they're perceived by the mass media. Due to their apathy about their presentation, the average Total Request Live-watching teen doesn't know about them, but that stops no one. They're here, they do what they choose and they're waiting quite patiently for people to find them, even if it's only one at a time.

One of the biggest reasons the major conglomerates have little interest in these folks is due to their inability to fit easily into a logo-encrusted box. These are musicians who avidly seek out music the masses ignore, and absorb elements from it into their own explorations. As music mutates and sprouts more and more pseudopods from its fluid corpus, more musicians take more elements from various styles, genres and strains, and yet more styles, etc. come to life. The average eclectician these days is as apt to draw inspiration from Bill Monroe and Japanese Kodo drumming as the Raspberries and Gothic dance music. Everything is fair game in today's wacky world of underground music; the only requirement is an advanced ability to blend disparate elements into a cohesive whole. Better to sound like an omnivore than a dilettante.

Massachusetts nonet maudlin of the Well is a great example of the kind of eclecticism that works. While technically under the extreme metal umbrella, there's a lot more to this band than that. The lineup includes keyboards, viola, cello, flute, clarinet, trumpet, various types of exotic percussion, double bass, saxophone and samples augmenting the usual core of bass, drums and louder-than-Thor electric guitars, while the vocals run from plaintive croon to hellborn roar and back again. MotW is conversant not just with death metal but also acoustic folk, psychedelia, instrumental post rock, shoegazing dream pop, prog and Gothic pop. Dubbing its particular brand of noise "astral metal," the band is careful with its catholic skills; they're smart enough not to pit a clarinet against a wall of power chords and inhuman growling. But the different sections of a song may take on individual musical characteristics, flowing into one another like tributaries into a mighty river. If some of those elements are compatible enough to work with, rather than against, each other, so much the better.

The group is also confident enough to record and release two albums' worth of songs simultaneously. While the reasoning behind releasing this music on two single records instead of one double is open for debate, what's irrefutable is the quality of the music itself. This is an aggregation of young people that take composition and arrangements seriously, and it shows in the careful method in which each song is constructed and performed. A good example is "The Ferryman," from Bath. The tune begins with mellow, echoed guitar arpeggios, which slowly build an intricate web of crystalline tones like capillaries leading to the main organ. The song shifts well-lubricated gears into a crushing hammer of six-strings, as the singer tears unintelligible (even on the libretto) words pertaining to Charon out of his throat. After a few minutes of wrenching pain (a description, not a value judgment), the music moves into a more symphonic mode while retaining its high volume; vocalist Maria-Stella Fountoulakis multitracks herself into an angel choir floating above the wall of sound. More psychedelia follows, then the song purposefully devolves into guttural, cacophonous muttering, before fading away into samples of water droplets falling into a full tub. The dripping lasts long enough for the listener to catch his or her breath before leading into the next track, a short, meditative folk tune called "Marid's Gift of Art." None of the tonal shifts feel gratuitous in any way; every move is carefully planned and deftly made. It's a remarkable journey, and it's only a portion of the continent of maudlin of the Well.

Bath overflows with such riches; the Cocteau Twins-gone-metal swirl of "Girl With a Watering Cart," the Goth/death/fusion/arena pop of "Birth Pains of Astral Projection," the luminous instrumental dynamics of "The Blue Ghost/Shedding Qliphoth." The pinnacle is "Heaven and Weak," a slowly building epic with lyrics like "And each time you dream in color/I'll be holding your head under" that puts psychedelic folk balladry into bed with majestic rock poetry so masterfully it makes "Stairway to Heaven" sound like the product of a third-rate bar band during Battle of the Bands night. Leaving Your Body Map contains just as many gems. "Gleam in Ranks" houses prog bass/jazz piano verses, crunching thrash rock choruses and whisper-to-a-shout vocals ("Our hero was gold!" the singer proclaims as the tune revs up). "The Curve That to an Angel Turn'd," also known as "The Garden Song," matches Opeth at its peak with its expert manipulation of screaming doom crashes and shimmering space folk. "Bizarre Flowers/A Violent Mist" goes back and forth between Gothic bombast and unrepentant death metal, ethereal beauty and distorted ugliness, with subliminal screeching, cathedral keyboards and a classic rock guitar solo. The lovely "Sleep is a Curse," which sports the telling lines "Great things come/But only as a blessing," drops the eclecticism for acoustic guitars, strings and a hushed, melodic vocal. The band fills its multiple tracks with myriad sounds without ever making the pieces cluttered and claustrophobic. It probably goes without saying, but headphones enhance enjoyment of these records immeasurably.

Lyrically motW concerns itself with ruminations on love and spirituality; one doesn't come without the other in these musicians' world, though it's probably fair to say that Bath is more concerned with the former and Map the latter. Regardless of the meaning behind their treatises, clearly as much thought went into the way the words sound together as into the feelings they convey. This is a group with something to say musically, and there's no trend or marketing scheme that will obstruct them from saying it. Maudlin of the Well is a band of true vision, and it's one you'd be remiss not to witness. Michael Toland

For fans of: Opeth, Porcupine Tree, Sigh

Copyright © 2001 High Bias