Restless Spirit – Afterimage Review

Sometimes when I write, I get stuck in a mental trap. On one side, I worry that I’m just repeating myself – that however many hundreds of times I’ve reviewed an album, maybe I really only have three or four different ways of saying, “This album is wonderful and I really think you should listen to it.” On the other side, I worry about finding just the right angle, just the right hook to start draping my observations on like newspapers over a coat rack. This becomes paralysis: if I can’t find the way to write something, I can’t write anything.

The beauty of language, though, is that even within a given vocabulary, the possible combinations are so high as to be functionally infinite. This is why I can assert with some confidence that it is unlikely anyone else in the history of human thought has written the following sentence*: Restless Spirit, the Long Island melodic sludge band, has the potential to teach its listeners radical empathy.

Please manage your expectations, though: this is a heavy metal record, and it’s a damn good one. Afterimage is the New York trio’s third album, and its finest asset is how it grounds obvious, palpable pain in stirring, giant-riffed musical communion. Opening track “Marrow” comes in with a huge guitar tone and drums that hit at a sturdy gallop, but the chorus pulls at the thread of that brashness, slipping into half-time accents on the ride cymbal that feel like pauses for reflection. “Shadow Command,” by contrast, is a spry boogie that dials up the prog/sludge vibe of Baroness or Taint. Marc Marello’s bass hits a series of staccato stabs so thick it’s like being slapped with a half-thawed steak. But then the whole seething mass relents, stepping aside for an achingly beautiful chorus.

Aloisio’s vocals are the most potent source of Afterimage’s emotional weight. Although Restless Spirit doesn’t sound at all like Type O Negative, there’s something in Aloisio’s delivery that is often reminiscent of Peter Steele’s higher register singing. His voice is sometimes reedy and tremulous, calling to mind Pallbearer, but at other times when reaching for outrage, it feels like a distant cousin to Crowbar’s Odd Fellows Rest. Restless Spirit sometimes makes me think about otherwise unrelated bands like Alice in Chains or Katatonia, because Afterimage has a way of making you want to sit with its desperate, inescapable melancholy, but to greet it like a friend just waiting to be heard and understood.

As I said up top, Restless Spirit do not seem that they have set out to do anything other than craft the finest album possible, but Afterimage can be a clinic in empathy. I have not spent enough time dissecting the band’s lyrics, but I feel the pain and naked emotion in every measure of their performance. Similarly, I have no idea if the album’s title has any relation to the Rush song of the same name from Grace Under Pressure, but that association has stuck with me as I sat with Restless Spirit, and feels more appropriate the deeper it goes. The point is, what can any of us know about the pain of others? Pain is universal but always unique in us, each bloom new in its folds, in the grain of it. Rush said it: “This is something that just can’t be understood.”

The pacing of “The Fatalist” is a perfect match to the title, with the drums and riffing mostly following a dejected quarter-note pulse, as if they can barely summon the energy to collapse into each subsequent measure. The storm clouds gather close around the song’s midpoint, and the band slows down almost imperceptibly to welcome a searing guest solo from Wino. “Hell’s Grasp” might be the album’s biggest triumph, though. It starts off sparsely, with Aloisio’s layered, grungy vocals and clean leads buoyed up by Marello’s steady hand. The downbeat they hit at 3:36 detonates like a fuzz bomb, and it leads into some of the most fiery, “fuck yes!”-worthy passages of the album. 

As “From the Dust Returned” winds the album down, it spotlights the gnarly, sinister snarl of the bass, and although the chorus is a huge, swinging, Sabbath-worshiping hook, it still feels pensive, restrained, uncertain. Watch the band from 3:47, though. Watch them closely, and you’ll see them pause a moment, look inside, take a breath, then look up and lock eyes with each other. The groove they lock into, that they hold in each other’s eyes as they churn their instruments in a purgative trance, is thick, rutted with the steps of many travelers. They do not know where it goes but maybe they find the truth and a strength in the choice to carry on, carrying on not because on the other side is a place where the pain has burned away but because if the pain is going to be there then why not take that pain to the other side and see what it looks like from there. This album is wonderful and I really think you should listen to it.

*This is not a writer’s flex, but something to carry into your own life. Try it right now: I bet you, too, can write something that no one else in the history of human thought has ever written. You are a gift.

Posted by Dan Obstkrieg

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

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