Bandcamp Three tracks, forty-two minutes, and according to the band the record was played and captured in a single take. Thirteen minutes, then ten and a half, then eighteen and a half. That is the whole album, and it is the sixth one from this group out of Bennekom.
M. Koops writes the music and plays guitar, B. Mollema sings and writes the words, N. de Wit is on drums, and T. Cochrane plays bass as well as producing. The subject, in the band’s own framing, is the pursuit of the unknown: local legends, lights seen in the woods, the ordinary surroundings looked at until they stop being ordinary. Greg Chandler mastered it.
The water tower
The band also say the record was reamped through the hollow cylinder of an abandoned water tower. That is the kind of detail a press release usually invents, and here it is audible in a way you can check. Everything on this album arrives wrapped in a long, hard-walled decay that behaves like a real space, and the vocals in particular sit well behind the instruments, pushed back into that room until they read as another layer of noise.
Whether that is a feature depends on what you want from the words. Mollema wrote lyrics for this record and you will not follow them. The voice is treated as texture, so if you came for the legends you will have to read them.
The last eighteen minutes
“Zwarte Zomermaan” is the reason to play this. It is the longest piece, the quietest on average, and by a distance the most dynamic thing here, with around thirty-two decibels between its softest and loudest stretches against six for the track before it. A closer that drops its average level and opens its range at the same time is a band trusting the material, and after thirty minutes of accumulated pressure it works.
The track before it is where the record is weakest. “Condities der Afstraffing” sits in the narrowest band on the album and stays there, and across ten and a half minutes that settles into a plateau. It is not a bad piece of writing. It is the one place where the single take shows, because there is no second pass to find a way out of the middle.
Recommended, and particularly to people who already know what this band do and want the long form version of it. The reservation is the middle track and, more generally, that this is a record which gives you nothing in the first two minutes of any of its three pieces. Start with “Zwarte Zomermaan” if you need convincing, then go back and take the forty-two minutes properly.
The closer is the outlier and it is the good kind. “Zwarte Zomermaan” runs about thirty-two decibels between its quiet and loud passages where “Condities der Afstraffing” manages under six, and it does that while sitting at the lowest average level on the record. Quiet and wide is the combination that lets a long piece keep somewhere to go.
It is also the darkest of the three by some way, with its energy centred lower and rolling off earlier than either piece before it, which fits a closer built on decay. Nothing here is squeezed: the peaks keep a healthy distance from the average throughout, so the wall stays a wall instead of collapsing into a single flat layer.
Standout tracks: Zwarte Zomermaan, Grondeloos Donkere Bossen
