Bandcamp When Amulet came out in July we described it as less an album than a document of three people listening to each other in a room, three improvised instrumental pieces titled “x”, “y” and “z”, warm and unhurried and wandering by nature. The band then got in touch to say that the second anniversary release was different: actually new songs, not just jams. That claim is easy to make and easy to check, and on Live Once it holds up in a specific, audible way.
The clearest evidence is the voice. On Amulet only one piece carried anything resembling vocals, buried in the cluster and distorted into another texture, with lead guitar taking the melodic role a singer would normally hold. Here two members sing, and “Starless Wanderer” puts a low, reciting, almost liturgical clean vocal dry in the centre of the field, intelligible from start to finish. Nearly fourteen minutes and it never once resorts to a volume jump for effect. The whole piece works additively instead: a repetitive foundation with new guitar motifs laid over it in layers until the thing has accumulated real mass. That is a written structure, not a found one, and it is the difference between the two records in a single track.
“Citadel” is where they use composition for contrast rather than accumulation. Sonorous sustained cleans trade with big distorted shouts, minimal near-meditative stretches drop into eruptive walls, and because the master has been left with headroom those drops actually register as drops. “Sacrifice” closes on the most extreme space on the record, long reverb tails and a near-sacral depth, with a saturated bass carrying the tonal weight while clean plucked figures keep articulation up in the mids. The kick works on low-end shove instead of click, the snare has an enormous room around it, and nothing has been ironed flat.
The reservation is the same one Amulet had, which is the honest thing to report rather than the convenient one. When these arrangements reach full density the low mids stack up: guitars and synths climbing over each other in the peaks of “Citadel”, bass resonances building past where they help on “Sacrifice”, mid accumulation in the busiest stretches of the opener. It costs the heaviest moments some definition, and it turns up on all three tracks. A band twenty years in with this much control over space and patience has clearly chosen this weight deliberately, but chosen or not, it is what keeps this at three rather than above it.
Two anniversary releases, five weeks apart, and this is the better one. The sleeve is a Kalighat painting of Kali from around 1890, which for a band founded in Hong Kong in 2006 by an Indian musician and now working out of Philadelphia is less decoration than autobiography. Thirty-two minutes, three pieces, no filler in any of them.
Nothing on this record has been mastered for loudness, and the three pieces use that space differently. The opener is the most restrained: an organic, analogue-feeling picture with a dry, focused clean vocal centred in the field, a snare with a woody body, a kick that gives warmth instead of attack, and dynamics that come from layers accumulating rather than from level changes. “Citadel” is the widest, long reverb tails over a massive low-mid fuzz texture, and it uses genuine drops between meditative passages and full walls. The closer goes furthest into space, with a near-sacral reverb depth, a saturated bass carrying the tonal load, and clean plucked figures keeping articulation in the upper mids. Vocals across all three sit inside the reverb field rather than on top of it and stay intelligible throughout. The consistent cost is low-mid stacking at full density, guitars and synths crowding each other at the peaks and bass resonances building past what the arrangement needs, which trims definition from the heaviest passages on every track.
Standout tracks: Starless Wanderer, Sacrifice
