Bandcamp The Emerald is a Tasmanian record about forests that mostly sounds like space. Martin Kennedy writes it on guitars, synths and soundscapes, Chris Bohm drums and Rich Gray plays bass, and across ten tracks it moves between two quite different ideas of how heavy music should be recorded. The album is at its best when the slower idea wins.
“Forest of Doom” is the clearest example of the good version. Wide, organically reverberant, with the macro-dynamics left intact so the delicate ambient passages actually breathe and the heavy arrivals do not have to shout to register. “The Word for Forest is World” builds the same way, pearling delayed guitar figures giving way to an enormous saturated crescendo, and “Predestination” keeps its layers legible even at full density, spatial lead motifs riding over a thick low-mid bed. These are the tracks where the title makes sense.
The other idea is loud and tidy. “Asterophora” runs hard-gated guitars with precise string separation, sample-supported drums with a clicking kick, and sits visibly against the limiter through its dense passages. “Voices Within” goes further, digitally saturated and knife-sharp, built for maximum impact. Both are competently made and neither belongs on the same record as “Forest of Doom”, because the thing that makes the atmospheric material work is exactly the headroom these tracks give away. It is not a genre problem, it is a mastering one.
The bass is the other running theme, and not in a good way. Track after track it supports the bottom without claiming any contour of its own, which is survivable when the arrangement is sparse and costly when it is not. In the densest guitar walls the mids mask each other, string definition drops out of fast riffs, and the low end becomes a single undifferentiated push. On a ten-track album that is a lot of accumulated mush.
There is a good sixty-minute record here and a very good forty-minute one inside it. The acoustic interlude in “The Eye Tree” and the ambient stretches throughout show a writer with a clear sense of scale, and the closing outtake suggests he knows it. If Kennedy trusts the quiet as much on the next one as he does on his best three tracks here, that record will be considerably better than this one.
Standout tracks: Forest of Doom, The Word for Forest is World, Predestination
