Bandcamp A man talks for most of this record. Not sings, talks: a low baritone recorded close enough that you can hear the room, set further forward than anything else in the mix, and it is the one element that runs unbroken from the first track to the last. Everything on The Origin of Everything is arranged around that voice, and twice the band leave it standing there with nothing behind it.
Our Ceasing Voice are from Innsbruck and this is their fourth album. It also lands in their twentieth year, which they addressed themselves when the record came out: twenty years on paper, but by their own count it has felt like “five or six” of them, with long breaks in between where people and lives and the music all changed. Sebastian Obermeir writes with singer Dominik Dörfler, plays guitars, synthesizers and piano, produced and mixed the album and recorded it in Tyrol with drummer Markus Rappold. Jakob Schuierer plays bass, Ludwig Maier mastered it, and it comes out on Argonauta.
Two songs with no band in them
“The Great Beyond” sits sixth of eleven and has no drum kit, no bass guitar and no distorted guitar on it. What carries it is synthesizer, a sustained bottom end, a pulse that barely counts as percussion, and the voice, harmonised when it opens. “The Great Beyond (Reprise)” follows immediately and hands the same material back to the band, loud for its first stretch and then cut hard into the quietest thing around it. The two measure exactly as that description predicts, the first with almost no cymbal energy in it and the second with a normal amount, and placing the pair dead centre in an eleven track album is not an accident. On vinyl it goes further than centre: Sebastian Obermeir told us the sides are split exactly between them, so the quiet version closes side A and the loud one opens side B. Two parts of the same thing, with the act of turning the record over in between.
The other one without a band is the closer. “The Exit Wound Blues” is a plucked clean guitar, a drone underneath it, the voice very close, and layered harmonies when the chorus arrives. It is the quietest track on the record by a clear margin, and it is the only place where you hear what this singer sounds like with nothing to push against.
The short one in third place
“Where I Belong” runs about two minutes and is the darkest thing here by a distance, with nearly all of its energy pushed into the bottom and the low middle and essentially no treble left at all. Dropping that at track three, before the album has settled into any habit, is the single most confident decision on the record.
Where it gives ground
Four songs, “June”, “Simplify”, “Diamond Eyes” and “Gasoline”, occupy almost the same tonal position and almost the same range. They are the band’s default setting: quiet verse under the spoken voice, heavy chorus with a shout over it, repeat. They are well made and they are the least distinctive material here, and because they are spread through the running order rather than grouped, they keep interrupting the parts that are genuinely strange.
So
Recommended, and the caveat is easy to state: the four songs that sound like a post-metal band are the weakest four, and this record is at its best whenever it stops being one. Come for the two tracks with no drums and the two minutes of darkness at number three and you will get something you have not heard this year. Come for the riffs and you will get a good band doing what good bands do. After twenty years and four albums, the interesting half of this is very interesting indeed, and I would rather hear the next one built entirely out of it.
The album splits into a default mode and a set of departures from it. Four tracks, “June”, “Simplify”, “Diamond Eyes” and “Gasoline”, land within about two hundred hertz of each other on tonal centre, between 1820 and 2028, and hold between eleven and thirteen decibels from their quietest to their loudest passages. The departures are measurable. “The Great Beyond” carries 9.6 percent of its energy above five kilohertz against 14.7 for its own reprise, which is what a track with no cymbals on it looks like next to one with a full kit. “The Exit Wound Blues” is the quietest on the record at -18.1 decibels average and has the widest distance between its peaks and that average, both consistent with a close voice and very little else. “Where I Belong” is the outlier at the other end: tonal centre at 1122 hertz, roughly a third of its energy below 250 hertz and 3.8 percent above five kilohertz. The record widens as it goes, with “Chival” and “The Exit Wound Blues” at nine and eleven opening nearly twenty nine decibels each. Nothing is mastered flat anywhere.
Standout tracks: The Exit Wound Blues, The Great Beyond, Where I Belong
