Snowed in at Daft Studios in Malmedy, deep in the Belgian Ardennes, living on the same soup for days while the drifts piled against the door, the five men from Flanders recorded their sixth Mass with Billy Anderson and Lucas Raport, and Neurot released it on 20 October 2017, their second album for the label after Mass V, in English, Flemish and French, six pieces and under three quarters of an hour of music built like a funeral procession that refuses to hurry. The weather is in the record. So is the cold.
Colin H. van Eeckhout sings, Mathieu Vandekerckhove and Lennart Bossu play guitar, Levy Seynaeve plays bass and, for the first time on a Mass album, helped write it, and Bjorn J. Lebon drums. The record exists in two versions: Anderson mixed the American release, and Jack Shirley mixed and mastered the band's own self-released European edition, with different artwork, on which the opener alone runs more than two minutes longer.
We need to have something within us to try to translate into music.
Colin H. van Eeckhout, Distorted Sound, October 2017
The method is the method Amenra have always used, carried further. Long passages of near silence, a single guitar, a voice barely above a whisper, and then the weight comes down like a church bell dropped through the floor of its own tower, all at once and with nothing held back. The swing between the fragile and the crushing is the whole architecture of the record, and it plays best taken whole, start to finish, the way a mass is meant to be attended.
What has changed is the voice. Van Eeckhout sings cleanly far more than before, and with far more confidence, and the clean lines carry as much weight as the screams. That is new for this band, and it is the reason this album reaches people the earlier ones did not.
"Children of the Eye" opens slowly and cleanly before the screaming starts, then moves through loud sludge, a calmer middle and a finale that buries everything under it. "Edelkroone" and "Spijt" are short readings of Flemish poems, breathing spaces between the masses of sound, and they matter more than their running times suggest.
The languages are part of the meaning. The two Flemish readings come from the band's own soil and are delivered without music, almost as prayers. The French hymn reaches back to a melody older than metal itself. English carries the rest. None of it is decoration; each language arrives where the record needs a different kind of distance from what it is saying, and the shifts between them work like the stations of a long procession.
The swing between the fragile and the crushing is the whole architecture of the record.
"Plus près de toi", sung in French and built on the old hymn known in English as "Nearer, My God, to Thee", is the centrepiece: a fragile middle section so quiet the hiss of the room becomes part of the music, before the band returns and flattens it. "A Solitary Reign" trades clean lines with screams before doom riffs take it under, a farewell addressed to a mother, and it is the most direct song this band has written.
"Diaken" closes the record as its heaviest piece and returns to the gloom of the opener, so that the album ends where it began, only lower. It is the strongest ending in their catalogue.
One limit stands. Across these forty-odd minutes, the songs share a shape, quiet then crushing then quiet, and a listener who comes to them one at a time, out of order, will hear them blur. This is not an album for shuffle. It does not forgive inattention, and it was not built to.
For listeners who know the slow end of heavy music, this is one of the strongest records of its decade. For those who have not met the band, it is the best place to start, because the clean singing opens a door the earlier albums kept shut. It asks for one uninterrupted listen, in the dark, with the volume up. Given that, it gives back more than almost anything else in its genre.