There is a particular kind of ambition in making an album where the second track runs to nearly sixteen minutes and the shortest thing on the record still clears seven. Doubtsower, the solo project of Cardiff-based multi-instrumentalist Matt Strangis, has never been interested in brevity for its own sake, and Nothing Reduced to Everything, his third full-length, commits to that position with a conviction that borders on defiant. All six tracks written, performed, recorded, produced, and mixed by Strangis himself, and mastered by Greg Chandler of Esoteric at Priory Studios, it is an album that announces its terms early and holds to them without apology.
“Trampled Ideals Sold Cut-Price” opens things at just over eight minutes, a measured introduction that establishes the record’s tonal centre, guitars layered thick, drums slow and deliberate, an atmosphere that feels more like weather than music. By the time it settles into its concluding passage, you have a clear sense of what kind of record you are dealing with. Then “Liars, Cheats, All” arrives, all fifteen minutes and forty-eight seconds of it, and the real shape of the album comes into view. The track doesn’t rush to make its point. It opens with a low, almost becalmed passage that takes several minutes before the full weight of the arrangement asserts itself, and the patience pays off, the moment the song shifts into its central riff lands with an earned heaviness that a shorter setup could not have produced. As a centrepiece it is demanding, but the demand feels proportionate.
The title track, placed third, is the most structurally direct thing on the record at seven and a half minutes, tighter and more purposeful, as if Strangis needed a moment to anchor the album before opening back out again. “Collective Sigh” follows, twelve minutes of something that moves closer to the post-metal end of the spectrum, layers accumulating and dissipating in a way that rewards close listening without punishing the listener who simply lets it wash. There is a quality to the middle portion of Nothing Reduced to Everything that resembles a controlled drift, not aimlessness, but a willingness to exist in suspended states longer than most heavy music allows.
“Exhausting Demands of Decency” brings a slightly more abrasive edge back into the record, its eight minutes carrying more forward motion than the tracks surrounding it. And then “The Burnt Witch of Civilised Behaviour” closes things at over eleven minutes, the longest bookend to match the longest opener, a track that accumulates slowly before arriving somewhere genuinely strange, the electronic undercurrents that run through Strangis’s work under his Kyam alias surface here more openly than elsewhere, giving the finale an experimental quality that broadens what came before it.
Chandler’s mastering is worth noting. The low end sits where it needs to without becoming oppressive, the guitars retain enough texture to feel physical rather than just loud, and the space inside the mix is preserved, a difficult balance to strike on material this dense, and one that Strangis’s solo home recordings could easily have lost. That it didn’t is a significant part of what makes the album work.
Nothing Reduced to Everything is not a record for every mood or every room. It asks for attention and returns it in kind. For anyone willing to give it that, the patience is rewarded.
Standout tracks: Liars, Cheats, All, The Burnt Witch of Civilised Behaviour, Collective Sigh
