Alda – Passage Review

Congratulations, of a sort, are in order for Washington State’s Alda. Whereas nearly all of their peers in the loamy, atmospheric black metal game focus on using delicate intros and gradually rising tension to explode their songs into huge crescendos, Alda bravely bucks that trend by using delicate intros and occasionally active sections to wallow in a turgid middle ground that never particularly goes anywhere.

Though it holds true for many musical styles, it’s quickly becoming an immutable law for this sub-genre of black metal that the line separating an engrossing, meditative atmosphere from a tedious, meandering riff-void grows finer with every tremulous, finger-picked neofolk arpeggio. Bindrune Recordings has a better win/loss ratio than most, with the likes of Panopticon, Falls of Rauros, and the mighty Wodensthrone to its credit, but Passage definitely feels like a case of privileging aesthetic over craft.

It also continues to hold that if you’re American and want to play nature-fetishizing black metal, you have to sound like a watered-down Weakling. (Europeans, on the other hand, seem contractually obligated to begin with early Ulver and Windir as their blueprint.) Where Dead As Dreams dredged its true magic from the passion of its delivery, too many of its descendants match the form without the fire. When album opener “The Clearcut” exhausts its four-minute folk intro and bursts into the expected blast-and-tremolo mode, the sound is every bit ‘live from a humid rehearsal space,’ but there’s no power behind it. In fact, it’s only really in the final three minutes of this fourteen-minute song that Alda settles into a riff that captures the woodland imagination.

Throughout the album, then, Passage‘s deficit is twofold: The folk and atmospheric sections are rarely tranquil and yearning enough to match its pastoral ambitions, and the black metal sections never have enough bite to convincingly evoke the pagan rage at late capitalism’s callous destruction of the world’s wilderness spaces and faerie kingdoms, or whatever such thoughts animate the increasing banality of black metal’s Green Party.

Passage is a profoundly dull album, a pleasant sort of buzzing clatter that assuredly inspires its creators, but falls flat in its efforts to pull the listener into a state of reverence at nature’s feral majesty. It’s hardly a high crime and misdemeanor, but when the recent musical landscape has seen, at twin poles, the immaculate brilliance of Musk Ox‘s Woodfall and the inexhaustible vitality of Panopticon, this sort of no-risk-no-reward album is the very definition of superfluous.

Posted by Dan Obstkrieg

Happily committed to the foolish pursuit of words about sounds. Not actually a dinosaur.

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