Watching the Falling Snow
#173 - #175) Light box set (2011)
Disc 1 - A Million Dead Beneath the Ice
1. When the Green Midwestern Sky Comes Crashing Down
2. When the Flood Waters Come Rushing In
3. When the Biting Winds Slice Across the Plains, They Will Carry the Seeds of Death Upon Them
Disc 2 - Life Is Meaningless and Goes on Forever
1. Life is Meaningless and Goes on Forever
Disc 3 - Worse Than Anyone Would Have Expected
1. The City
2. Again
3. Watching the Falling Snow
Light was a 2 man black drone doom band who were, according to their myspace (remember that?) from Minnesota. they released 3 albums, all included in this set, before disbanding. i'm not 100% sure about the years of release but it looks like the first album was out in 2008 and the last 2 in 2009. they were limited to about 50 copies each.
this box set was released by Crucial Blast's Crucial Blaze imprint. it contains the 3 albums, a book of photography, 3 pins that match the disc artwork and it's limited to 200 copies.
since i'm still like a month behind on posts i'm gonna be super lazy and let Crucial Blast describe the albums:
The first album of the set is A million dead beneath the ice. The first
song begins with a squall of abrasive noise, a thick tangle of squirming guitar
skree and whistling feedback, almost Skullflower-esque, all smoking amp wreckage
and shrill guitar scrape, but then almost immediately we hear the faint strains
of a flute in the background, followed by the band proper suddenly springing up
with a slow, dismal dirge. A slow, creeping percussive clank, just pieces of
metal minimally keeping time while ghastly unintelligible screams and whoops and
wasted chanting waft across sheets of buzzing, extremely distorted noise and a
creepy funereal riff that sounds like it could be someone playing a
pipe organ, or maybe a rumbling bass guitar buried under all of the murky,
cobwebbed distortion. And that flute whistles aimlessly throughout the whole
thing. This first song alone is incredibly bleak and creepy sounding, a weird
cross between the extreme funeral dirge of Skepticism and the shapeless abject
horror of Abruptum, as if both bands teamed together to perform Gene Moore's
eerie score to Carnival Of Souls. But then the second song "When the
Flood Waters Came Rushing In” appears and something very cool happens to Light's
sound. The simple, almost clicking percussive beat continues its dead tick-tock
pulse, but the pipe organ from the beginning is largely replaced by a massive
droning riff and a gorgeous slow-motion lead that unfolds for almost eleven
minutes within a torrential downpour of fuzz, creeping along like a Codeine song
slowed by half and blanketed in speaker hiss. As slow and lumbering as this song
is, it's also really pretty, the major key chords crawling like magma as the
vocals, previously howling and screeching in the background, now become more
prominent and transform into weird, almost bluesy howl. The whole thing has this
glacial drama to it. Then we come to the third, final song, which reaches on for
nearly twenty minutes, and takes shape as a mix of everything we've heard
before. Another majestic doom riff drifts slowly through the amp-haze, again
layered with clean guitar, but it's much darker and more ominous, the vocals
returning to their previous feral state, the whole song hanging with this cloud
of dread throughout as it lumbers on, finally drifting out in the last couple of
minutes into a blur of distant rumbling whir, strange guitar scrapings, and what
seem like voices lost in a heavy fading mist of reverb.
The ambitious and
exponentially more wretched second album from Light is Life Is Meaningless
And Goes On Forever, a single, hour long epic that at first seems to pick
up with the exact same minimal hi-hat pulse of the debut, the thin percussive
clink providing what little momentum the music has as a single droning guitar
chord unfurls like black smoke. And then the screams begin. Where on earlier
Light material the distant reverb-clouded howls were relegated to the
background, here that voice is right up front in the mix, issuing some
of the most hideous, gargling shrieks I've heard since Fleuerty's A Darker
Shade of Evil. At first the overwrought raptor screams almost border on the
absurd, but as you fall deeper into this and those swooping, gargling shrieks
melt into the creeping glacial dirge, it all adds up to a uniquely psychotic
experience that drips despair and horror from the speakers for the entire length
of this album. After a while, the guitars fade off as a piano takes over, and
the music changes into this gorgeous slow-motion requiem for most of the
remainder of the song. While the sound is very different, the sparse, extreme
bleakness of this album is reminiscent of that of Corrupted's Llendose de
Gusanos.
The final Light disc Worse than Anyone Would Have
expected returns to the more bleary, abstract haze of the first album.
Starting with the grim ambient dirge of "The City", Light once again bathes soft
minor key guitar, deep buzzing drones and washes of keyboard and meandering
flute in a heavy fog of amplifier hiss while those anguished shrieks sound in
the distance. The next song "Again" is even more ghostly and minimal, the hiss
and fuzz growing more prominent, the eerie minor key guitar melody echoing way
off in the shadows, the sound becoming washed out and grainy, like some Tim
Hecker remix of a suicidal black metal dirge. The third song is the grand
closer, almost forty minutes of this washed-out, miserable grey drift, driven by
a spare slow moving bass line and those haunted organ tones, a soft ticking
barely perceptible under the thick sheets of softened static. By the end of the
first ten minutes though, the guitars undergo a subtle change, the miserable
dissonance transforming into a gorgeous slow-mo melody, again evoking shades of
Codeine and that sort of spacious, brooding slowcore, and this goes on for much
of the remainder of the song. There's still an underlying creepiness to the
music, but it's mostly imbued with an incredible sense of sadness, of
hopelessness, and a kind of absolute dejection as it drifts endlessly like a
Tangerine Dream piece grafted onto the most wretched blackened doom imaginable.
so yeah, this is some very cool stuff. Worse Than Anyone Would Have Expected is probably my favorite of the 3 albums. the sounds seem a little more varied and album closer "Watching the Falling Snow" is amazing. dark and beautiful, it reminds me a bit of a Nadja track.
