Bandcamp Twenty minutes, four songs, and more room between the quiet and the loud than almost anything we have put through the meters. Bestia jeszcze śpi sits second of the fifty one albums in our measurement set for dynamic range, and it is not a close second. For a style that usually arrives squashed into a single bright block, that is the headline before anything else.
Tower have been going since 1994, built around Peter Kolleck in the Warmian-Masurian corner of Poland, and this EP is the work of a band with nothing left to prove to anybody. Nothing here is rushed and nothing is padded.
The one with no guitars
“Jesienna Modlitwa” sits at track two and drops the entire metal apparatus. No electric guitar, no bass guitar, no kit. What is left is piano, synthesiser pads, a pulse that sounds machine-made rather than played, and a Polish-language clean vocal carrying the whole thing from an intimate opening to a full-voiced chorus. It is the quietest track on the record and the one with the least weight in the register where a guitar normally lives.
Dropping a guitarless ballad into position two on a four track EP is either a mistake or a statement, and here it is the second one. It resets the ear before the record’s heaviest stretch and it makes the return of the wall land harder than a third riff would have.
Two voices, used properly
The rest of the EP runs a clean female lead against deep male growls, the pairing this genre has been doing since the nineties and usually does badly. What stops it being a cliche here is that the two are not simply alternating verses. The clean voice holds the melodic line and the growl works underneath as weight, and on “Niosę Grzechy Imion” the band let a long acoustic passage run before either of them arrives.
That track is the widest single piece of music on the record and seventh widest of everything we have measured. It earns that by actually going somewhere quiet first. “Pustka” closes with the brightest and thinnest-bottomed sound here, which after twenty minutes of low-middle heaviness reads as the record opening a window on its way out.
So
Recommended, and without the usual caveats about older bands. This is a short release that uses its length properly, a production that left the dynamics alone when every commercial instinct says to flatten them, and a sequencing decision at track two that most bands would not dare. The reservation is simply scale: four songs, and one of them is the ballad, so the heavy material amounts to roughly fifteen minutes. There is not quite enough here to know whether the approach holds across a full album. Start at “Niosę Grzechy Imion”, then go back and hear what track two was setting up.
The dynamic range is the finding. Across the four tracks the distance between the quiet and the loud passages measures 15.9, 10.5, 27.7 and 20.5 decibels, a median of 18.2, which places the EP second of the fifty one albums in our measurement set. “Niosę Grzechy Imion” at 27.7 is seventh widest of any single track we have measured, and it also carries the highest peak to average distance here at 17.0 decibels. The master is left quiet to allow it: average levels run minus 17.7 to minus 20.0, against roughly minus 11 to minus 13 for most records in this genre. “Jesienna Modlitwa” is the structural outlier and the measurements agree with the ear: 13.4 percent of its energy in the band between two hundred and fifty and eight hundred hertz against 16.3 to 25.0 for the others, 21.3 percent above five kilohertz, and the lowest average level on the record. “Czarna Róża nad Grobem” is the opposite case with 25.0 percent in that same low midrange. “Pustka” is the brightest at 2918 hertz with 26.5 percent treble and the least weight under two hundred and fifty hertz at 16.4 percent.
Standout tracks: Niosę Grzechy Imion, Jesienna Modlitwa, Pustka
