Culture

Rating: 5/5

Dark ambient is a genre drenched in imagery of the ancient, the gothic and the biblical. Its blacker-than-black noises are derived from the vaults of industrial music, stretched into barren wastes and yawning abysses of sound. Often dark ambient songs are long and slow, crushing and engulfing the listener rather than thrilling them. While you may not find it exactly raising your pulse, you may well find it raising the hairs on your neck.

Lustmord is one of dark ambient’s biggest names, with a career that has spanned three decades and explored the genre in many different forms. His latest, The Word As Power, is an album with a strong focus on vocals. Five years in the making, it features a host of guest singers (including Swans’ dryad Jarboe and Maynard James Keenan of Tool) who chant and throat sing over tectonic plates of noise. It’s vast. It’s gloomy. It’s gravely serious. It has no words, nor does it need them. In their absence, The Word As Power manages to ache with beauty, sadness, anger and hope, often not in isolation.

Many listeners will find the album appropriately daunting. At 75 minutes in length and without a syllable in English, from the outside The Word As Power will appear unassailable, impenetrable even. Your only hope of infiltrating it is by listening to it. Eventually, you’ll stop finding yourself outside the album’s granite gates, but within them. It may happen during the opening song, the cavernous “Babel,” or after your first full listen through. Or perhaps your second, or even your third. But once inside, you’ll be able to feel every note, every subterranean murmur, every last facet and detail Lustmord spent half a decade carving.

The Word As Power is divided into seven songs, ranging between five and 17 minutes. And yet the sum of these parts is so seamless and whole, it is difficult to distinguish particular moments or songs as highlights. One track that does manage to rise above the rest, however, is “Grigori.” Deep and reverberating, it doesn’t ask for your attention so much as swallow it whole. Soriah, the Sufi throat singer who guests on the track, now ranks among my favourite vocalists of all time, just for his work on this song. Just as he sings without a single word, I cannot find a single word to describe him. If you’re going to listen to any song this year, listen to this one. But do so in the context of the rest of the album.

It will be only too easy for people to dismiss The Word As Power, for any of a dozen reasons. It will be called boring. It will be called pompous. It will be likened to the Gladiator soundtrack, or any soundtrack that uses wordless vocals to suggest momentousness – wailing vocals during a death scene, earthen throat singing when a hero is crossing a desert. While those examples of vocal ambience merely reinforce an existing image, The Word As Power paints images of its own. All of the mythology of dark ambient – its angels, demons, wastelands and megaliths – is here in full force, more vivid and dramatic than Lustmord has ever conjured before.

The Word As Power is far from a humble album. It yearns to be the most epic, important collection of sounds you’ve ever heard. Let it be.