Negative Plane - Stained Glass Revelations
January 20 2011 at 10:43:23 AM  Jack Clement almost always got it right. And he was well on point when he offered the journey likely mattered more than arrival. Negative Plane, who’s been together in some form since at least 2002, and has managed to put two full-length records out over nine years, is obviously in touch with Cowboy Clement’s folky take. Band couldn’t be more at odds with irksome industry standard of incessant output and nagging visibility. And their music is ostensibly better for it: sophomore effort, Stained Glass Revelations, sounds every bit the record crafted over five years. Meaning? It’s tall and wide and dense. It’s dark and heavy and intricately detailed. It’s built mindfully and unfolds spectacularly. It’s sort of record great bands used to make over big blocks of time, and I can only goddamn hope it’ll be received in self-same way those records were: carefully, slowly, deliberately, throughout enormous and reckless calendar days dedicated solely to abandon, absorption, devotion to these 10 tracks and nothing so much as a queef of anything else. Plenty to gnaw on here. Maybe too much. Apropos first cut “The Fall” embraces so many traditions at once it becomes about everything n nothing, standing at its conclusion profound and as monolithic an opener since the 10-foot tall n bulletproof version of Possessed embellished “The Exorcist” with Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells.” There are plentiful shades of the aforementioned therein, as well as Goblin’s bewitched leitmotif for Suspiria, Samhain’s “Birthright,” and a sorta “Thus Spake Zarathustra” reinterpreted by the teenage Larry LaLonde, chimes shimmering, bells bonging, blood letting in an absurdly effective black mass raveup as Lovecraftian as nearly anything I’ve heard committed to tape. Nameless Void’s guitar work gives good reason to clear cliché stables n use overused crit adjective “epic,” as he channels Daniel Ash, Robby Krieger, Link Wray, Shermann und Denner, Under a Funeral Moon era Zephyrous, the aforementioned LaLonde, and probably dozens more in a style unmatched in its aggressive nuance, majesty n precision, powering a band sounding every bit the logical heir to Mercyful Fate’s once flatlined brand of Heavy Metal built on equal parts occultism and the sorta ambient horror redolent of Hammer Films n Argento’s more dented fetishistic creations. Makes sense it begins this way. It must. And it develops like I/you think it should, like it must, tall and wide and dense and dark and heavy and intricately detailed. What follows is unrepentant processing of the tone n fundament of “The Fallen.” Incessant, labyrinthine tunes built from tablature bound to give freaks fits over the next 20 or so years, working out riffs that will likely practically refuse to be reworked as they lend themselves more to a sorta geometric grammar rather than traditional notation fretted over in dank basement dungeon, Anywhere USA. These are pictures being put together. Segments set into place. Dots left out in space winking for connection. Maybe you’ll see it all at once. Take it all in. Receive it as the eyes are instructed by the mind to remember a sight seen—burned out home sweet home, flying buttresses Notre Dame de Paris, family dog flattened into gore blanket by 18-wheeler and fed on by itinerant buzzard. Maybe it’ll come as it did for me, running rich n puzzling, giving no ground n lunging ever forward. And the mind mixed up n fumbling—more akin to coming home drenched in drink n settling in to Henry James around four a.m. Syntax more a web. Simple declarative sentence wanted n never found. Just relent. There’s stuff therein to break the trance ever so often. Few feeler vibes here n there, specifically with the record’s three instrumentals, “The Third Hour,” “Charnel Spirit,” and “Stained Glass Reflections”—all cozy blood kin with Bauhaus’ “The Three Shadows Part 1”—may serve needed pause for the Herberts recently whacked in ass with the NED Bible. They do nothing so much but bring me back to early teens, where weekends were spent sucking bongs, shooting booze, blacking out to Tones on Tail. Nothing to see there. But here they show a band intent on bridging gaps n shoring up connections long extant but rarely brought to light. Hand n glove fusion of Goth n Metal may take bold lede here. But nothing will dispel quick notion this record’s built from inside out, lending a pined for sorta ritual narrative to listening experience, a front to back suggestion not only novel but essentially goddamn verboten in current day n age. O if only “promise” of Evil was more “convincing”—conspicuous, maybe—there’d be more chatter, rambling, incessant clicking of smart phones. There is Big E Evil here n there in flashes ephemeral n overwhelming, the sort thought extinct, the dandified macabre Fate mastered with deft sleight of hand, showcasing a force men once trembled before and dared not speak its name. Evil as presence, as trace, long since abandoned for meat-headed anthropomorphic renderings of goats n gargantuan genitalia. But the enormity n import of a tune like, “The Number of the World,” where Krieger’s “Spanish Caravan” gets transliterated via Ash’s gothic penumbra n privation can’t be lost on many, right? We don’t have to be pulling of hair and prone to flagellation Bid D Devout to connect with Merton’s more ecstatic poetry, or have some modicum of understanding of what “mystical experience” could consist in via San Juan de la Cruz’s more sanguine writing. As with “The Number of the World,” there are sometimes in this shitty world when Art is born outta magic, folks, and there’s no need to raise blood pressure once again over incessant celebration of musical kitsch, shameless in its joyful imitation of greater creations. We just “get” a tune like “The Number of the World,” just like we “get” tunes like “Lamentation and Ashes,” or “The One and the Many.” Or at least I fucking hope we do. Maybe Cowboy Clement was sorta right. I get the idea n import of “journey.” I do. And I understand how massive that notion can be in a context like this record. From start to finish. Every petty process that helped put together these tunes. Practices. Honing solos. Bass n drums forever working the horndog today / estranged tomorrow vibe. Nothing maybe too different from thought to conception in dank basement dungeon, Anywhere USA. But the ambition here alone, the accomplished comp, the willingness n drive to not imprison the music in some bullshit genre tradition, echoing contemporaries n pretending all the while to have contributed something worthy of more than 140 characters or fragmentary description n Mediafire link…. Ineffable? No, not really. The journey means “a lot.” It gives quick breath to “apotheosis of making,” to art’s eternal “existing-in-itself.” But in the end, amidst all the “what for” n “how” n “why,” we’re left with a record that deftly balances contradiction between the “made” and the “not-having-become.” May certainly be work in progress, folks—a “journey” of sorts—but don’t kid yourselves, Negative Plane has arrived. [Stewart Voegtlin] Related
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For whatever reason, I never made the connection with Possessed or Bauhaus. After you mentioned it, it totally clicked. In their doomier moments, they also remind me of the murkiness of Nemesis. I really dig how wet his guitar sound is (a la Daniel Ash). It definitely adds to the uniqueness.
Ive read a couple people ragging on the cover art, but I think its the perfect visual representation of the music.
Great job, Ajna! Now, if theyd only release RiMs Urkaos&
Possessed clicked immediately w/ me first time I heard Et in Saecula... And a lot of the riffs here folks wrongly insist on referring to as "surf" are no different than the runs LaLonde used in "The Exorcist" on Seven Churches. That NV plays a goth counterpoint to them makes 'em even richer.
Don't understand the artwork jibe either, but then again it was started by the same guy who compared NP w/ Ghost and The Devil's Blood.