Apparitions Waft In With Gritty, Dystopic, Drifting Sonics

by delarue

One of the best album titles of the year is Eyes Like Predatory Wealth, by Apparitions. Is the record – streaming at Bandcamp – an expose of BlackRock, or Vanguard, or central bank digital coupons? That’s open to interpretation. The trio of guitarist Andrew Dugas, keyboardist Igor Imbu and drummer Grant Martin play the kind of genre-resistant instrumentals this blog loves so much. Is this postrock? Horizontal music? Industrial soundscapes? A dystopic film score? Maybe a little of all that, available on limited edition cassette!

The album consists of three long tracks. Martin takes centerstage with his judiciously tumbling drums over slowly shifting, gritty, droning tectonic sheets of sound as the band make their way through the first soundscape, Ecstasy Through Self-Destruction. Differentiating where the individual guitar and keyboard voices are doesn’t seem to be the point of this music. At high volume, the rattling distortion is abrasive; at low volume, it’s actually quite soothing, until the very end when somebody seems to blow a fuse.

The second track, River of Fundament, is twice as long, with roaring, crunchy low-register guitar textures emerging to contrast with wafting keyboard ambience. Guitar drops out, drums take over, then the calm/agitated dynamic returns.

The closing cut is a full half-hour that starts so imperceptibly you have to turn up. It’s the most calmly lingering, ambient interlude here, at least until the band turn it into a more animated synopsis of everything that’s come before. Stick with it for the payoff.

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