Bandcamp Bands that name an album after their own duality are making a claim you can check. Coal is the aggression, Crayon is the melancholy, and the quintet from Rügen put both words on the cover of their fourth record. So we measured all ten tracks to see whether the split is an idea or a structure.
It is a structure. The split lands exactly where you would put it, and then the last two tracks refuse to stay on either side of it.
The line is exactly where the title says
“Impending” through “The Great Misgive” keep their dynamic range inside eleven and a half decibels, the narrowest of them at nine. Four tracks in a row holding one intensity, which is what the heavy half is supposed to sound like.
Then “Reflection Divide” opens to twenty, “A Light Of Autumn” to twenty one, “Torn & Frail” to twenty two. Three steps rather than one, and the aperture is wide open by the eighth track.
So the border runs between tracks five and six, dead centre of a ten track album. Coal and Crayon get five pieces each and the concept does what it says on the cover. If the record ended there it would be a tidy idea, cleanly executed, and nothing more.
The last two tracks are the ones worth arguing about
“Rite Of Devotion” is track nine and it is the tightest thing here, seven and a half decibels, narrower than anything in the heavy half.
That is the decision the album turns on. After three tracks of opening up, the band close the aperture further than they ever did at the start, and they do it one song before the end. A record that had simply walked from Coal to Crayon would drift out. This one snaps shut first.
Then “Still” runs twenty six decibels, the widest here, and finishes at the far end. The two halves are declared and then the ending crosses back over the line in both directions inside seven minutes.
Robert Lefold confirmed the reading after this review went up, and his answer is better than the guess: “Rite of Devotion and Still are probably one track, and because of its uplifting character it seemed fitting at the end after a very melancholic chapter of the album with Reflection Divide, A Light Of Autumn and especially Torn & Frail. Rite always felt very different and I like records that end with a little twist.”
So that sudden tightening at track nine is the twist, and it was placed there on purpose. The measurement found the shape and the band supplied the reason.
What the opening tells you in ninety seconds
“Ashore In Fragments” is a minute and a half and it does not sound like the rest of the record at all. Three percent of its energy sits above 5 kHz, where every other track is between fifteen and twenty. Over a quarter of it sits in the low midrange, where nothing else gets past seventeen percent. I hear no distorted guitars on it at all.
It is the darkest piece on the album and also the thinnest at the bottom, with the least energy below 250 Hz of any track here. Everything sits in the middle, and it works as a held breath before “Impending” arrives with the full band.
Where it leaves me
Four out of five, which for us means a record we will push at people.
Robert Lefold produced, recorded and mixed it himself, Mathias Ruck’s drums were recorded by Philipp Krätzer and Lefold at PK Studio Rostock, and Jan Oberg handled the bass reamping in Berlin. Mathias Dahlsveen of Vanvidd, who stood in for Finntroll on part of their winter tour early this year, sings on “A Light Of Autumn”. The peaks survive everywhere: peak to average never drops below thirteen on any of the ten tracks, so the loud passages are loud because the band play them that way.
The reservation is that four-track block at the start. “Impending”, “Grace Of Collapse”, “Ember” and “The Great Misgive” hold their average level to within half a decibel of each other and their dynamic range inside two, and by the fourth one the heavy half has said what it has to say. Those four run eighteen minutes of a forty one minute record, and nothing in them moves far enough from the others to need its own place in the sequence.
Start with “Rite Of Devotion” and then play the record from the top. Hearing where it refuses to drift tells you more about this band than the opening salvo does.
Ten tracks, forty one minutes, and the two halves the title promises are visible in the numbers. Tracks two to five keep their dynamic range inside eleven and a half decibels. Tracks six to eight run twenty, twenty one and twenty two, so the border sits at the exact midpoint.
The last two tracks are where it gets interesting. “Rite Of Devotion” closes back down to seven and a half, tighter than anything in the heavy half, and then the closer “Still” opens to twenty six, the widest here.
The intro stands apart on almost every axis: three percent of its energy above 5 kHz against fifteen to twenty everywhere else, over a quarter in the low midrange against a ceiling of seventeen, and the least bass on the record. Only its dynamic range is unremarkable, sitting between the two blocks. Peak to average stays above thirteen throughout, so nothing was flattened to get the volume.
