Bandcamp Three pieces. Nineteen minutes, seven, thirteen. That is the whole record, and the first of them spends more than five of its minutes before a voice arrives.
Bands returning from a long absence usually do the opposite. They open with the proof, the riff that says we still have it, because the gap has made them nervous. Kongh open with patience, and the confidence that takes is the most immediately audible thing about the album.
The waiting is the method, and it is the reason the band is worth the wait. This is the first Kongh record since 2013, and David Johansson plays almost all of it, with Christian Augustin on drums and Jörgen Sandström adding backing vocals. For a project that is effectively one person with help, the record has a remarkable sense of a room being filled rather than a file being assembled.
“Staining the Ether” holds that opening silence, and when the voice does arrive it is buried deep, closer to a texture than a lead, and that placement is the whole aesthetic in one decision. The title track goes further still, holding out past six minutes before anything human enters, and it has the widest dynamic range on the album as a direct result. A piece that spends a third of its length building has somewhere to go.
“Guided to the End” is the outlier and the shortest thing here by a distance. It is also the brightest and the most tightly compressed, which gives the record its one moment of forward pressure. Placed between two long pieces it works as a hinge rather than a single.
The production deserves the specific praise that it has not been flattened. Nothing here is quiet, but the distance between the softest passages and the heaviest ones stays wide enough that the arrival of weight registers as a change in scale. In a genre where the loudness war is usually lost before the first riff, that is a decision somebody had to defend.
The sleeve says the rest. A black monolith on red, and the black is not holding its edges: the grain eats into it from every side until the shape starts to come apart. Dissolved in time, printed at the bottom, almost redundantly.
Thirteen years is long enough for a band to come back as a tribute to itself, playing the part of who they used to be. This one came back with three pieces that refuse to hurry for anybody, which is the harder thing and the better one.
The three main pieces hold a consistent tonal picture, mid weighted and dark without being muddy, and they differ mainly in how much room they leave themselves. The title track has by a clear margin the widest span between its quietest and loudest passages, which is what you would expect from a piece that stays instrumental past the six minute mark before anything else enters. “Guided to the End” sits at the other end: brightest, most present in the upper register and the most tightly held of the three. Nothing here has been mastered flat, the peaks keep their distance from the average throughout, which for music this heavy is a decision rather than an accident.
Standout tracks: Dissolved in Time, Staining the Ether
