Rwake – The Return Of Magik Review

[Cover artwork by Loni Gillum of Minerva’s Menagerie and RWAKE]

There are lyrics in “The Return of Magik,” the title track of Rwake’s sixth album and first in almost 14 years, with variable payloads. Two examples. One: “Beyond the opposites and beyond the balance/ It’s the return of magic in a crystal fucking palace.” Besides the obvious ‘they’re singing the album title!’ jolt you get from some Joni Mitchell songs, that couplet is far more poetic than we’ve come to expect from sludge/doom/stoner. And when delivered in an acidic spokel by singer Chris Terry, that line hits provided your own life experiences are riding along in tandem. Two: “To all the witches in the woods/ And to the goblins that understood/ There is a spirit that walks among us/ And it is living proof.” Eh. That one is almost unnervingly earnest, nearly stumbling into the ‘I hope you know I tried to find those pictures, Jordo‘ zone, a valley where profundity and cringiness coexist. And that’s the Little Rock sextet’s record in a nutshell, really. On the one hand, hot damn. On the other hand, a diaristic quality permeates Rwake’s music, which will test your tolerance for how resonant you find someone else’s intense soul-searching to be.

Still, same as it ever was? The Return of Magik is the Rwake-iest Rwake album that Rwake has released, the next step in a band lifecycle that has been rolling along for almost 30 years. The Southern Neurosis of Hell Is a Door to the Sun, the band’s second album but first real voice-finding effort after breaking out of its chrysalis, is still providing the band’s bedrock, but Rwake has built a launch pad atop it that has propelled it toward Alpha Centauri. The experimentalism of 2007’s Voices of Omens and 2011’s Rest has been exponentially increased and handled with the confidence of vets who have seen plenty of tours in the trenches. Indeed, in an interview with …And Volume For All, Moog-meister and singer Brittany Fugate said this is Rwake at its most polished, and the Sanford Parker (release another Buried at Sea album, coward) mix and Magnus Lindberg (Cult of Luna) master back up that claim sonically. But the songwriting has matured, too. Laid out like a 59-minute single experience, The Return of Magik‘s rise and fall is masterful, forgoing the song-construction tropes of the sludge/doom/stoner troika for an omnicore approach to genre agnosticism, to the point that, in an interview with Lambgoat‘s Vanflip, Fugate and drummer Jeff Morgan only embraced “atmospheric” as a stylistic descriptor, which is accurate and kind of incredible considering the amount of damage atmo black has done to the term. Anyway, the key to Rwake’s success is this dualist nature, suggesting it can go anywhere while ensuring that the compositions are actually very tightly structured.

But within that dualist nature is the same quirk outlined by the lyrics: At times, the results are revelatory, like the ego-death of a well-timed DMT trip, but at others, that same stretch sounds like someone telling you about how they drafted a fantasy football team against ancient gods while on ayahuasca. It’s a strange disconnect. More than the music, your own personal metadata — whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re feeling — seems to drive whatever you derive from it.

Take the opener, “You Swore We’d Always Be Together.” Following a rootsy bit of Americana a la Angels of Light, a theme that will be reprised later with the more downtroddenly beautiful “Φ,” Rwake unleashes a huge judder of a riff while Fugate and Terry trade vocals. Terry’s charismatic sneers sound like a preacher, perhaps appropriate given the band’s base camp within the Bible Belt, a connection Fugate has made in the past. Then, there is a brief respite with guitarist John Judkins chipping in some additional pedal steel, which gives the song some uplift before the centerpiece riff descends like an extinction-level event meteor. Finally, we’re off on a journey, with Rwake exploring variations on that riff while taking the long way home to point B. “We have always been obsessed with dynamics and how music progresses from a listener standpoint,” Fugate told New Noise Magazine. “We love using extreme contrast between beautiful interludes and crushing heaviness.” That dynamic interplay is an effective bit of songwriting, drawing you in and keeping you there. But there are lyrical moments that threaten to shake you out of the immersion. The very Circle Takes the Square by way of Shakespeare line “Double double toil and trouble/ Fire burns and the pot bubbles,” is a tough hang. To some ears, that’s a hook. It’s a clunker in mine. Still, heaviness heals all wounds, and “You Swore We’d Always Be Together” is that. Not to mention, the solo from new lead guitarist Austin Sublett rips.

The harder sell on The Return of Magik is “Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration,” the most, you guessed it, psychedelic track of the bunch. It begins with, I kid you not, a Kerouacian poem written and performed by Jim “Dandy” Mangrum of Black Oak Arkansas for singer Chris Terry. Unexpected! From there, the near-14-minute track explores the outer reaches of the Rwakean atmosphere before eventually coalescing into a song. To the band’s credit, it doesn’t feel like 14 minutes, owing to its players’ keen sense of pacing and drummer Morgan and returning bassist Reid Raley’s acuity for keeping things interesting. And the song isn’t that different from what A Sun That Never Sets-era Neurosis was up to, emphasizing the quiet to make the loud hit that much harder, not to mention the underlying ritualistic qualities, something that Fugate pointed to in that chat with New Noise Magazine. But its indulgent qualities can still feel like a stumble if you’re not in the right headspace. “We don’t write music with a listener in mind,” Fugate said to Lambgoat. “We always write music for ourselves. We’ve never been like, ‘Well, let’s write a song like this.'” That’s laudable in the ‘artists don’t owe you anything sense,’ but the inverse is also true: listeners don’t owe you anything, either. And because this is Rwake writing for Rwake, “Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration” has a curious flatness, a tabla rasa-ness, which is emblematic of the entire album.

Again, same as it ever was? That open-to-interpretation quality is good art in a sense, something that challenges you to proffer your own read on the material instead of beating you over the head with it. But, more often than not, I find The Return of Magik to be so insular, like witnessing the escstaticism of a religion of which you’re not a part. That limits the album’s appeal to being situational: good in the gym, a bit of a slog in the car, etc. It doesn’t envelop me so much as my circumstances envelop it, a remoteness that’s different than, say, REZN’s mood ring metal or something like Sleep, which is immediately inviting. For some, that’s a selling point, that cracking the nut yields rich meat. But for me, I find that The Return of Magik is pleasant enough, but it’s only memorable if you have memories ready to attach to it. It’ll undoubtedly soak up everything you give it, but you’re in the role of the giver. The one loading the payload is you.