Feversea – Man Under Erasure Review

[cover artwork by Isak Lønne Emberland]

In the perennially cute n’ sassy world of chemistry, there are two types of mixtures: heterogeneous and homogeneous. Either type could be up your alley, depending. Sometimes you want a nice, clean club sandwich, each layer snapping and crisping and…meating – separately, of course – to your tongue’s content. Yet sometimes you want to just slop into something uniformly gloppy. No, this isn’t the transcript of the sales pitch for Manwich. I’ve got a Diamonds & Rust on canned sandwiches brewing though, so, hold on to your cheeks. Where were we? Oh, Norway’s Feversea and their debut album, Man Under Erasure, an accomplished record and a type of mixture over which I’m having more than my fair share of angst properly identifying.

Feversea pull liberally from a number of genres – black metal, post-metal, shoegaze, and more. The end result is an ice-cold blade with a heavy hilt, capable of both piercing flesh and denting helms. The guitar parts run the gamut from caustic to crushing. In fact, the most grounding component of the blend is the guitar. When at times Man Under Erasure threatens to float away, the guitar tone – like peeling, black paint in the background – colors the scenery with an ugly and variable texture. Isak (who are you, me?) Emberland also has a cheeky compositional ability to use his riffs, his thickest slabs, as his ace in the hole. There were plenty of moments listening to this record where I got lost in the dreaminess only to be Sweet Chin Music’d by a muscular heel around the corner.

~The camera floated higher above the ring, and while our hero did indeed get pinned, a satisfied stank face implied that maybe he might have enjoyed the loss.~ (star wipe to thrust of narrative)

Where is the black metal, you ask? Why, in the shrill shades of the tremolo picking, my dear. Where is the post-metal, you inquire? Why, in the massive walls of crashing sound, both hollow and dense, that control the dramatic pulse. Where is the shoegaze, you implore? Well, kind of see my previous response but add in the forlorn and distant wail of a siren, detached, beckoning, both disaffected and overflowing with emotion. But there’s more to it all. Listen to the Immortal Bird-esque gnash and swagger of “Until It Goes Away” for a late-album beatdown. Peer into the throbbing void that is “Sunkindling” for a chilling march into an alternate realm where The Great Cold Distance-era Katatonia cosplayed as Dreadnought. “Decider” swings for the cosmic fences, compiling every trick Feversea has to great effect. The opening clean chordal section buoys a beguiling melody by vocalist Ada. Once you think you’re settling in, however, the lights flicker and down, down into the maelstrom you go. The last two minutes of the track contain the most promising material of the entire album, and you’ll notice I didn’t mention another band, did I? Here there be subtext – carry on.

“Decider” shows me that Feversea have the ability to coalesce their disparate musical influences into something greater than the sum of its parts, to make a truly homogeneous mixture. THAT is what is most exciting to me about Man Under Erasure. All of the elements of a great and idiosyncratic band are present, be they presented rather kaleidoscopically. There are always pieces and sections and parts of each track here that I really admire, but the album as a whole can feel like just that – pieces, sections, parts. Heterogenous, if you will. An idiot in my position is prone to over-analysis, yes, but such are my quibbles, nonetheless.

Therein lies my conundrum. I really do like what Feversea is shooting for. Man Under Erasure, thematically, is the total package. The band obviously aimed high conceptually, aesthetically, and you know what? They stuck the landing. If you’ve a passing interest in the oncoming shroud of night, the overall vibe of the 1998 sci-fi oddity Dark City, or obsessively dabble in and bicker over the small details of the dark and heavy niches of the world (ahem), you should bend your twitching ear to Feversea.