On Pyramids‘s self-titled debut album from 2008, the Texas-based band sounded like a photo-negative version of Blut Aus Nord‘s mind-bending MoRT album, all blown-out brightness and brittle dream-pop shards colored ominously by black metal echoes. Although the band has been active in collaborations (most notably issuing full-length projects with Nadja and Horseback), A Northern Meadow is only their second album as a stand-alone band. That collectivist ethos still prevails, however, as A Northern Meadow finds Pyramids’s line-up augmented by guitar wiz Colin Marston, ambient artist William Fowler Collins, and Blut Aus Nord’s own Vindsval on drum programming. The result is an album of shimmering, gossamer beauty that transmutes the strengths of all the players into a whole that easily hides its mortared joints.
Compared to the band’s debut, A Northern Meadow is significantly less fractured: the songs are longer and more traditionally structured and the vocal hooks are more up-front. If the debut was light through a warped prism, then this album is a series of focused studies in phosphorescent watercolor. Vindsval’s drum programming is unmistakable, although his patterns fall closer to the lighter touch of Blut Aus Nord’s Thematic Emanation of Archetypal Multiplicity EP than the claustrophobia of the 777 series. Adding Colin Marston on additional guitar also gives A Northern Meadow more than a little touch of Krallice‘s dense, joyfully overlapping instrumental voicing.
But while the music is fascinating in its own right, the real gift of the album is in the way its instrumentation interacts with and plays against the vocal melodies. With few exceptions, the vocals on A Northern Meadow are angelically clean and winsome, like some midpoint between Radiohead‘s Thom Yorke and Justin Broadrick in Jesu. “Indigo Birds” is one of the best examples of this, where the vocals dance again and again to “Just look at the bed you’ve made” while the music whirls and churns. Occasionally the singing syncs with the music, but more often they play against each other in careful, studied tension, the guitar bends and unexpected resolutions of the arpeggios shading an otherwise light melody with charcoal grays and midnight purple.
One of my favorite things about music is its flexibility. It can be played loudly or quietly; it can serve as background noise or as one’s sole object of focus; it can be engaged with as a solitary act or with others; and it can either induce a particular mood or reflect an existing mood. With that basic contextual malleability, I can’t say exactly how you ought to listen to Pyramids. But for me, as I listen again and again to this remarkable album, it feels like something to sit and get lost in. Truthfully, by following one thread of the music as it spools off from the rest, by finding one shard of guitar and tracing its exodus from the whole, A Northern Meadow almost feels like it can shift your sense of where you are. If you find time to sit with this album, then, and walk with it wherever it will take you, maybe it will also feel to you like there’s something on the other side worth chasing.
