Bandcamp Track two runs eleven minutes and fifty-five seconds. The other four together come to twenty-three and three quarters. That is the shape of this record before a single note is discussed, and it is an unusual place to put your biggest idea.
Aralez are from Dresden and this is their fourth album, five songs the band describe as pieces they had been playing live for some time before deciding to record them. The music sits between doom, psychedelic and progressive, and the thing that organises it is a clean female voice that carries the melodies while harsher registers work underneath and around.
The long one
“Beauty of the Dark” is the album, in the sense that everything else is measured against it. The band call it double-parted and say they added cello to it, and at twelve minutes it has the room for both halves to go somewhere of their own. It opens on low growls and narrated passages, moves into the clearest and most exposed singing on the record, and comes back to the harsh voice at the end without the handover feeling like a gear change.
Putting that at position two is the decision worth arguing about. The record earns your attention immediately and then has three and a half shorter songs to hold it with nothing on that scale left. “Illusion” and “Shameless” are good enough that this mostly works, but the sequencing means the album’s largest piece is behind you before the halfway mark.
What the rest does
The title track is the most dynamic thing here, with the biggest distance between its quiet and loud passages, and it spends that range: the voice arrives around the two minute mark and sits further forward in the mix than anywhere else on the album, dry and close.
“13.11” closes and goes the other way, the tightest and brightest track, with vocals that arrive late and work as texture. As an ending it refuses the resolution the long middle piece set up, and that reads as deliberate.
Recommendation
Recommended. Five songs, thirty-five minutes, a band with a clear idea of what their singer is for, and a twelve minute centrepiece that holds together across both of its halves. The reservation is the running order: a record this short can only afford one piece on that scale, and spending it at position two means the back half is always working at a smaller size. Start at “Beauty of the Dark” and then decide whether you want to hear what comes after it or what comes before.
One practical note. The band’s Bandcamp gives 24 October as the release date, and the album is streaming in full ahead of it, so this is written from the complete record rather than from singles. We have not found an Instagram account for the band that we could verify as theirs.
The title track is the widest thing here, running about fifteen decibels between its quiet and loud passages, where the closer “13.11” sits at under eight and holds its level throughout. The rest of the album lands in between, so nothing is flattened and nothing is left shapeless.
“13.11” is also the brightest track on the record and the one with its energy sitting highest, which fits a closer built on texture. “Beauty of the Dark” sits in the middle of the album for brightness and in the upper half for range, which is roughly what a twelve minute piece should do if both of its halves are doing different jobs.
Standout tracks: Beauty of the Dark, Illusion, 13.11
