Neurosis - Hypnosis before the end

It's rare, extremely rare, to come across an evolutionary process as complex and richly nuanced, in sonic conception and organic growth, as the one undertaken by Neurosis. An initiatory journey toward the discovery of the hidden recesses of the psyche and consciousness, a long introspective process of dissecting the abstract components of the human being, highlighting the opposition between "flesh" and "spirit": starting from the former, piercing through it, to eventually reach and touch the latter, observing it, purifying it. An artistic vision that has generated a devoted following, both among fans and among musicians on whom the "Neurosis sound" has had a considerable influence. After a hardcore-rooted start, a gradual yet thoroughly radical departure from that sound led them to define a style, a sound, an imagery all their own, touching on the heaviness of doom and the most assaultive garage rock, bleak industrial shades, the bareness of acoustic folk, and ambient-tinged psychedelia. All of it pursued with extreme consistency and through gradual steps, always one intuition ahead of everyone else, leading us toward a shadowy trance state before the world explodes before our eyes.

First Period

The heart of Neurosis began beating in 1985 in Oakland, California. The first steps of this long journey were taken by guitarist/singer Scott Kelly and bassist Dave Edwardson, who had just parted ways with Violent Coercion, together with drummer Jason Roeder, who would only join the new project in early 1986. They remained a trio in the rehearsal room until a second guitarist, Chad Shelter, was recruited in January of the following year. Twelve months later, the first Neurosis album saw the light of day. It's time for Pain Of Mind (1988).

A handful of demo tapes, at the time the only means of gathering some following in the dense hardcore underground. That was the band's résumé by the time, thanks to the independent label Alchemy, the primordial Pain Of Mind was released onto the market. The idiom is essentially that of Black Flag-style hardcore, with songs aiming straight for physical impact through still-raw, primal-spirited tracks ("Self-Thought Infection", "Dominoes Fall", "Ingrown", "Reasons To Hide") or the occasional hyperkinetic assault ("Training"). The individual technical execution and the overall cohesion are those of a band still visibly finding its feet. The compositions are lean, essential, the arrangements bare-bones, underscoring the physicality of a sound that doesn't yet aim to unhinge the listener's psyche. Either way, the first step has been taken.

Also in 1988 came the three-track EP "Aberration", raw in sound quality and direct in substance. The songs on it (three in total) don't stray from the coordinates set by the debut album.

A first, important turning point in the history of Neurosis is certainly represented by the arrival of Steve Von Till. A gifted songwriter (we'll cover his solo projects in due course), guitarist and vocalist with a warm timbre strongly complementary to that of his alter ego Scott Kelly, Von Till crossed the threshold into the Neurosis camp in 1989, just in time for the second album, The Word As Law. After this addition, the band's historic core (which would never change lineup again, aside from Shelter, who had already left) moved toward its complete definition. The final piece would arrive shortly after.

New contract, new record. This time it's Lookout that grants "artistic asylum" to the four Californians, and they repay the trust placed in them by taking a far-from-negligible step forward in their evolutionary path. With The Word As Law the band proves to be a white fly within the hardcore scene. It's clear that their compositional approach is increasingly driven by the will to definitively break the genre's conventions, to create a "stylistic rupture" that would broaden their expressive means and grant them independence, to "move beyond" hardcore. The structures of some songs stretch out, the anger is still there, but it's no longer so extreme, now subjected to greater control that nonetheless doesn't dilute its propulsive charge. The atmospheres also grow darker, the formal solutions more expansive: "To What End?" features a combined piano-and-acoustic-guitar break that exponentially raises its sense of unease; "Blisters" stands out with a "progressive" development and acoustic turns, in a kind of ballad halfway between pastoral and proto-grunge openings; in "Day Of The Lords" an unexpected carpet of keyboards suddenly emerges; Sabbath-esque traces mark the well-structured pace (in its first part) of "Tomorrow's Reality". The use of two voices helps give the songs greater variety: Von Till's and Kelly's voices interact, bark, and intertwine at multiple points. Their timbres, as complementary as they are different in certain tonal shades, would become a weapon the band would rely heavily on throughout this journey of sonic introspection, which with "The Word As Law" begins to set sail.

Second Period

It's 1991 when the band decides to recruit new members. Simon McElroy (who would leave the band after Enemy Of The Sun) joins the songwriting process as keyboardist and tape/sample manipulator, while Christ On Parade guitarist Noah Landis (here handling the same duties as McElroy) joins the group for live shows (over time, his weight within the songwriting process would become absolutely significant). The live shows, in turn, were enriched by the images projected by video artist Adam Kendall, who would collaborate with the group through Sovereign (later on Josh Graham would join, also handling the production of the A Sun That Never Sets DVD and taking part in Tribes Of Neurot).

Souls At Zero officially opens the second phase of Neurosis's career. The band has landed at Alternative Tentacles, the obscure label owned by Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedys, specializing in bizarre crossovers between punk, metal and hardcore. The influence of Melvins, already glimpsed on The Word As Law, now becomes conspicuous in the heavy tread of the title track with its venomous riffing; but that influence seeps into pretty much the whole album. The break with the song form is by now irreparable, the arrangements stretch out further and further, reaching considerable lengths (the title track exceeds nine minutes, "Stripped" brushes up against eight, as does "To Crawl Under One's Skin", while "A Chronology For Survival" runs nine and a half minutes).

The atmospheres grow even darker, buoyed by a certain doom inflection, not only within the guitar work, thanks to riffs with increasingly slower rhythms and an inevitably Sabbath-derived lineage, but more specifically within the very essence of the songs, in which a black flame seems to burn, voraciously consuming all the surrounding air.

The album's final stretch holds some of the band's best compositions: "Stripped" is a funeral shroud stirred by an icy wind, "A Chronology For Survival" is utterly spectral, as is "Flight". Faint epic undertones can be felt in "Sterile Version", while the post-Slayer-style intro of the exceptional "The Web" oozes pure cynicism.

The sonic fabric grows ever more refined: beyond a not-insignificant contribution from the keyboards, violins repeatedly make an appearance ("A Chronology For Survival", "Flight") as do horns (again on "Flight", "Sterile Version"). The departure from the past finds its definitive realization here, not confined solely to the mere morphology of the songs, but also implying a certain change of direction in the lyrics, no longer focused purely on socio-political themes as in the first two records, but instead devoted to an abstract depth of absolutely grey and hallucinatory tones, in perfect synergy with the songs' sonic constructions.

With Souls At Zero, the band finally codifies its own style with the grandeur befitting a great creature, now fully aware of having so much to say within the contemporary musical landscape.

If Souls At Zero thus traces out with extreme clarity the road ahead (one that will nonetheless always remain unpredictable), Enemy Of The Sun, released just a year later, nails down a songwriting that is already remarkably solid and personal in its own right. The band still moves within the spaces carved out by the previous record, with an impact that remains visceral ("Cold Ascending" and "Lexicon", the title track) thanks to walls of sound built on cascades of riffs harder than stone. At the same time, though, the fabric of the new compositions makes room for gothic floods, identifiable too in certain vocal passages with an evocative, esoteric bent ("Lexicon", the intro to "Raze The Stray") or in keyboard effects that forge atmospheres recalling the most slippery, creeping Swans. The morbidness of certain grooves is vivid and tangible, and "Raze The Stray", with its alternation of viscous post-metal assaults and gloomy openings of violin and keyboards, with a decadent piano emerging here and there beneath a thick blanket of electronics, is a perfect example of it.

Enemy Of The Sun often carries the feel of an impending catastrophe; the "Cold Ascending" / "Lexicon" pairing is like an infernal blaze turning into concrete reality on Earth, while the opener "Lost" jars with its artificial harmonics, slashing through the austere air surrounding it like piercing screams of pain. "Cleanse" is the darkest track, the one that seems to act as a link to some unknown spiritual dimension: a fourteen-minute tour de force of obsessive percussive tribalism that stretches the soul's strings to breaking point, while the following twelve minutes are a repeated cry that drills through the wall of paroxysm.

For a couple of years, silence falls. Expectations around the band are now very high. Souls At Zero and Enemy Of The Sun made it clear to most that Neurosis are a creature in constant evolution, bearers of a new way of fitting together sounds and atmospheres, capable of charting the course for a better definition of the concept of "post-hardcore".

The peak of inspiration, balance between the various elements (not without the contribution of new ones and the development of those already present) and sheer ferocity is without doubt Through Silver In Blood, the album that definitively establishes the band and propels them among the greats of the 90s noise-alternative scene.

Our heroes have now settled with the US label Relapse, a true talent scout of the extreme scene, the one that, with the dawn of the new millennium, will knock Britain's Earache Records off the throne of "best extreme label", thanks to a first-rate roster always open to new, worthy and "oblique" additions.

Co-produced by the band themselves with Billy Anderson (whose catalogue boasts names such as EyeHateGod, Swans, Melvins), Through Silver In Blood sees the light of day (only to snuff it out entirely as its tracks unfold) in April 1996. The album opens as Enemy Of The Sun had closed: an esoteric-tribal rhythm introduces and underpins the claustrophobic wickedness of the track that gives its name to the whole work, built on glacial guitars that trigger ulcerating harmonic progressions, repeated with cynicism and savagery. The vocal symbiosis of the Von Till/Kelly duo reaches peaks of cruelty and despair that spill into a dark abyss, where there seems to be no room left for human life. Winds of sticky industrial dust begin blowing relentlessly, clogging the lungs and numbing the senses. We are facing the most nihilistic monologue Neurosis have assembled so far, and the iconoclasm of a track like "Locust Star" speaks for itself.

Ambient temptations surface in the prologue of "Purify", which opens with martial solemnity before immediately giving way to a neurotic assault of whirls and arcs traced by malevolent riffs, moments of full-blown violence alongside others where the din drops away to make room for Celtic echoes drawn from John Goff's bagpipes. The tension stays at fever pitch throughout the record's full seventy-plus minutes: the mournful, grieving litany of "Strength Of Fates" suddenly turns into a dramatic sentence of eternal damnation, a punishment inflicted on souls that seem to scream over the haunting, bleak arpeggio forming the backbone of the sepulchral ultra-doom of "Enclosure In Flame", preceded by a venomous "Aeon" that opens with a touching piano sketch set against the harmonic backdrop of viola and violin. Redemption passes through silver, its total fulfilment lying in a magmatic sea of blood.

Alongside the main band, the members of Neurosis have also put their hands to a project with strong extra-musical components. Tribes Of Neurot, by the own admission of those who brought it to life, represents "a deeper, different-level exploration of the concepts and feelings expressed by Neurosis's music through the use of languages based mainly on the manipulation of high-tech media, including film, visuals and rituals". Six albums have been released so far, the latest dating back to 2005, Meridians. It's an ambient project that often flirts with the "isolationist school", catapulting the listener into abstract dimensions where echoes, interference, tribal pulses and long contemplative pauses cross and follow one another, the perfect vehicle for dissociating mind from body. The collective has even gone as far as forging an album by manipulating sounds taken directly from the world of insects (Adaptation And Survival – The Insect Project, 2002). Worth noting is the collaboration with avant-garde guitarist Scott Ayers, better known to most as Walking Time Bomb, on the gorgeous Static Migration from 1998. The existence of Tribes Of Neurot will exert a strong influence on the music of the "mother band", and in future the "formal" points of contact will become far more visible to the naked eye.

The deal with Relapse continues with the release of Times Of Grace, three years on from the masterpiece that preceded it. At the helm this time sits Steve Albini, ex-Big Black and lider maximo of that towering math-rock machine going by the name of Shellac, as well as a guru-producer in the alternative field (and beyond: need we mention his work with Nirvana on "In Utero"?) and a pivotal figure in the development of the still thriving post-core scene.

Albini's touch roughens up the guitars, now grittier and oozing more electronics in several spots ("The Doorway"). The symptomatology of "Times Of Grace" still carries that same sense of unease and impending doom ("Under The Surface", "End Of The Harvest"), while opening up to a greater psychedelic echo that surfaces repeatedly across the album's grooves: the opener (in the sense of "intro") "Suspended In Light"; the tunnel in which "Belief" is enclosed, where the atmospheric pressure builds almost hypertrophically; the post-rock repetition of "Exist". Strong folk inflections also make their way in, an "ambient folk" that projects the Neurosis imagination onto vast, desolate, dark lands, a gaze toward landscapes that in later records will become a true object of sonic investigation for the band: "Away", the closing "The Road To Sovereignity", the strong Celtic tones of "Descent" are episodes that, more than any others, throw open the windows onto a landscape devoid of any human warmth, where wheat fields are stirred by mournful breezes. As one can easily guess, with Times Of Grace one period comes to a close, but at the same time another opens up, even more complex and rich in nuances and elements, some external to the band yet always closely tied to it.

Third Period

"Neurot Recordings is a fiercely independent label dedicated to the spirit of sound. Formed by the members of Neurosis and Tribes Of Neurot as a means to further their musical vision while achieving control of their own destiny, the primary function of NR is to serve as an outlet for the increasingly prolific output of all their related projects". This is the slogan that appears on one of the pages of Neurot Recordings' official website, and it well explains the artistic needs that led to its founding, thanks to the very members of Neurosis, who personally oversee its management. Over time the label has become a genuine point of reference for lovers of experimental sounds spanning the orchestral post-rock descended from the climaxes of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Explosions In The Sky (Tone, Red Sparowes, Culper Ring, Tarentel), the most avant-garde, "industrial-ish" noise (KK Null, as well as his chaotic Zeni Geva), the most forbidding ambient [the Lotus Eaters trio of Stephen O'Malley (Sunn O)))/Khanate)- Aaron Turner (Isis/Old Man Gloom) – James Plotkin (Phantomsmasher/Khanate/O.L.D.), Justin Broadrick's Final], the "post-folk-rock" of Grails, the psychedelia of early Pink Floyd stretched out over long compositions (Om). Within such a varied catalogue, the productions of the mother band and its related side-projects slot in perfectly.

Neurot Recordings' first release is Sovereign (though the Relapse logo still shares the back cover, a situation that will persist in the band's future works too), a dark Ep that Neurosis feed to their fans on October 31, 2000. It includes four tracks: "Prayer" is a magmatic crescendo that burrows past the cerebral cortex, wrapped as it is in an unhealthy, sacrificial-rite atmosphere; "An Offering" winds its way between solemn austerity and blasts of ulcerous nastiness worthy of the Souls At Zero and Enemy Of The Sun era, as does the title track, which burns like an untamed fire with its almost sudden rises and falls.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle the evolution charted by Neurosis from the close ties with the numerous parallel projects of some of the band's own members. A process of layering and sedimentation of genuine "sonic experiences" that flow into the band's sound, becoming homogenized and giving fresh lifeblood to an inspiration that is never short of ideas, eager to absorb every creative impulse its members' minds are subject to, thus opening up new expressive paths for a framework already packed with such distant elements (think of the "noise-core" background merging with the acoustic-folk urges soon to be developed). A glance at the other side-projects therefore becomes essential.

Without a shadow of doubt, Steve Von Till's solo work makes a significant contribution. In 2000 the guitarist released As The Crow Flies, a seven-song record steeped in dark colours, where acoustic guitar and the artist's warm voice — never so expressive — become the main protagonists. It feels like witnessing the funeral of the soul in some isolated corner of rural land, where no one will ever hear the anguish of those who remain on this earth to go on carrying the cross. The calm Von Till generates is destabilizing, so depressive, blacker than black, at times morbidly suffocating ("Stained Glass", "We All Fall", "Warning Of A Storm" are the genuine highlights of the lot). A folk-blues with orchestration stripped to the bone, over which the wonderful timbral nuances of Von Till the crooner stand out.

Two years later the blond guitarist returned with a new, more mature album, a natural continuation of the path just begun. On If I Should Fall To The Field the structures remain just as skeletal, with orchestration stripped to the bone, but in the songwriting a few faint glimmers of light start to break through, slightly thinning the heavy blanket of ash that had obstructed it. Singer-songwriter-like and intimate (with frequent points of connection to the Mark Lanegan of "The Winding Sheet", whose voice Steve's closely resembles), "If I Should Fall To The Field" drifts languid and intangible between ballads laden with tears and hope (the grandiloquent "To The Field"), others where the tradition of early-20th-century American rural settler music inevitably takes over ("This River", "My Work Is Done"), a Neil Young cover that forcefully underlines the deep tie to the American folk songwriting tradition his solo works seem to pay homage to ("Running Dry"), the vivid Irish hues of "Am I Born To Die" (a song belonging to Celtic tradition), and the sweet organ beds of "Dawn" and "Breathe". Closing the record is "The Harpy", an old recording of Von Till's grandfather (complete with hiss that underscores the "temporal distance" from the listener) reciting a poem by Robert W. Service. Without mincing words, a small, great gem.

Von Till uses the pseudonym "Harvestman" to sign Lashing The Rye, released by Neurot Recordings in January 2006. The voice disappears, the sounds are diluted into liquid soundscapes laden with drones and semi-distortions, in a mix of Tribes Of Neurot (from which the abstract, almost intangible sound is borrowed) and Celtic folklore, kept alive through reinterpretations of traditional classics like "The Sea Maiden" and "Green Hills Of Tyrol". An exceptional fresco embracing both psychedelia and the most visionary ambient music.

Fellow bandmate Scott Kelly is likewise not averse to dusting off his musical roots. Folk, blues, country: these are the territories explored on Spirit Bound Flesh, his only solo work to date. A lesser work compared to Von Till's, the album brings to life a minimalist blues built on airless acoustic arpeggios and shadowy vocal melodic sketches, nothing more. What really cripples the album is an inspiration that doesn't always manage to fully fill out all its passages (the monotonous "Sacred Heart", the exhaustingly long-winded "Through My Existence" are rather unfortunate moments). Certainly "Flower", "The Passage" and "I Don't Feel You Anymore" are the best things the record has to offer.

In '99 Dave Edwarson also allowed himself a one-off detour, collaborating with the formidable Noisegate on their "The Towers Are Burning", while 2003 brought the debut album of Blood And Time, a project featuring Scott Kelly on vocals and guitar and Noah Landis on keyboards (plus a rhythm section made up of Anthony Nelson and Stephen Garrett). At The Foot Of The Garden is an inconsistent and rather uneven album, always playing the same formula of bland rhythms and acoustic fingerpicking. A cluster of pastoral-natured ballads, some of them quite well crafted ("Deep Inside", "Shinig King", "Our First Thought", "The Garden"), but a persistent sense of tedium keeps creeping in along the way. A minor work, in every sense.

A quick note on Combat Music, the web radio station run by Scott Kelly and Christopher Moeschl, which keeps many of the best bands from the extreme alternative scene and beyond in daily rotation.

Buoyed then by the new experiences of some of its members, as we've just seen, the band returned to the studio with Steve Albini to follow up Times Of Grace. What many have widely dubbed apocalyptic folk now fully enters the band's legacy, taking on real weight and a precise place within the increasingly organic Neurosis-ian style, in which hardcore seems almost entirely dissolved in favour of psychedelic currents that pierce and crumble the physical impact of the guitars. A Sun That Never Sets is the result of several forces acting upon one another, for one another, with one another. The vantage point shifts ever more towards the boundless spaces of the psyche, seen as a planet to explore, trying to extract its deepest, most hidden and subliminal fears and thoughts, aspects clearly visible in the lyrics. The arrangements become in some ways more orchestral (just consider the penultimate section of "Falling Unknown"), heightening the polyphonic aplomb, drawing on heavy doses of strings and electronic effects that radiate an all-encompassing, dark, cerebral aura.

The harrowing "The Tide" truly swells like a tide in the dead of night (its unsettling effect amplified by the footage in the video included on the record's DVD, directed by Josh Graham, whom we mentioned a few paragraphs above), sweeping away, towards a dimension foreign to human perception, so many souls just exhaled by one last mortal breath. The majestic suite "Falling Unknown" is at first filtered blues, rendered flexible and malleable according to a new logic, taking on a new form, able to be projected into an abstract cosmos that seems to take shape in the song's second half. The grating dissonances oozing from the chords underpinning the jagged title track let a perverse nakedness show through, juxtaposed against the deafening desolation of "Watchfire". "From The Hill" is unsettling right from the start thanks to its opening contrast: the aggressiveness with which Scott Kelly delivers the first lines clashes with the "emptiness" generated by the sparseness of the instrumental arrangement beneath it, with only drums and bass accompanying this funeral march, which will be coldly caressed by bagpipes and clawed at by guitars that build to full-blown grandeur. The hand of Kelly the solo artist weighs heavy in the opening of "Stones From The Sky", which launches into turbulence with a faint kraut flavour, building up, then suddenly dying out amid "frequency disturbances".

Every track is as alive as still-wet paint dripping beyond the geometric limits of a sterile canvas on which it was laid down by a brushstroke trembling with unspeakable despair. Neurosis's new interlocking puzzle thus generates a hypnotic symphony beneath a sun that will never set, a dire omen for a world destined to be scorched by its blazing rays. The year is 2001.

One could easily argue over the strong points of connection, mainly in attitude (but not only), between the California quintet and the Swans of Michael Gira and his muse Jane Jarboe. The unhealthy gothic hues, the nods to folk, that pervasive sense of imminent ending, the constant sonic exploration that has allowed both bands to evolve over time while keeping their own identity intact. The close bond between the two acts becomes a definitive monolith in 2003. Neurosis invite Jarboe to the spirit's new funeral, to regenerate it in new garb. The coupling produces a monstrous creature: Neurosis & Jarboe. The lines drawn by the quintet weave admirably together with Jarboe's voice, which holds centre stage with her theatricality, moving between psychopathic-witch convulsions and the untouched purity of soft whispers. Venomous industrial stenches typical of the most masochistic Nine Inch Nails emerge ("Cringe") while a purifying exorcism is carried out ("Erase"), singer-songwriter-like passages where Tribes Of Neurot and Neurosis's latest "bucolic" tendencies intersect in an ethereal, floating, elusive ambient-folk ("Receive"), or in liquid, echo-laden climaxes that spill out like an estuary into ultra-doom slowdowns ("His Last Words"). When she (Jarboe) converses from a distance with him (Von Till), "Seizure" blooms: anaesthesia for the heart. It stops beating.

N&J is pain distilled into eight vials that, once uncorked, release into the air a noxious reek of death, hard to bear. Bodily and mental isolation in its purest form, a natural prelude to the total dissection that arrives the very next year.

Between 2002 and 2003 two official bootlegs are released in the meantime: one recorded in Lyon, France, while the other is a recording of a live performance in Stockholm. It is only in 2004 that the band would return with a brand-new work entirely under their own name. The Neurosis journey arrives, at least up to this point, at its final, solitary station. This time an omniscient vision guides our heroes, just as the cover image suggests, which well captures the spirit of the whole record: smooth and polished in its silvery grey, torn open at one corner by the eye of the storm. A storm of moods, of sensations clashing with one another, a sidereal journey between zones of blinding light and sudden sunsets that darken the landscape. The music is now highly contemplative, relaxed, shadowy. The fusion, the fulcrum between the flows of Tribes Of Neurot, the apparent calm of Von Till's and Kelly's solo works, the psychedelic and visionary exploration never abandoned over the years (indeed, ever more refined) finds in The Eye Of Every Storm its absolute material consistency. A new aesthetic devoted to the pure dissociation of mind from body, an operation so delicate that only consummate surgeons like Tool have managed to carry it out so admirably.

The sonic architecture, despite an evergreen sophistication in its layering of timbres, is now leaner, stripped of the orchestral fullness that surfaced on the previous record. It subtracts, skims the layers of sound to lay bare their essence. Moments of build-up toward intense peaks dissolve in the blink of an eye to make room for amniotic zones of decompression, as if a limbo were pulling us in to absorb us within itself. Singling out this or that episode matters little. There is no disjunction at all between the tracks that contribute to its unfolding. Once caught up in it, there's no escaping the eye of the storm.

Compared to the liquid, dense sound of their recent works, Given To The Rising (2007) presents itself in part as a return to the past, picking up the thread left off with the granite-hard "Times Of Grace" (1999, Relapse). To put it simply, one might say "less drone and more sharp, direct riffs". Although across the album's 70-minute runtime there's no shortage of evocative, atmospheric moments (the intro to "To The Wind" is spectacular).

The album opens with the nine-minute title-track charge: a manifesto of power and rage that reaches its apotheosis in the long finale. Even more granite-like and Sabbath-esque is the wall of sound on "Fear And Sickness", with Scott Von Till determined to scream his lucid disillusionment to the world. The world is in ruins, and Neurosis chronicle its collapse. The synchrony between drums, bass and guitars is flawless. Not a single gear is out of place, and every detail is tended to with the utmost care. Credit certainly goes to Steve Albini's usual dry, minimal production, but above all to the tightness Neurosis achieved after so many years together. A true war machine.

The debris left along the tail end of "Fear And Sickness" is partly covered by the delicate intro of "To The Wind," the most melancholic moment of the entire album, where Neurosis's kinship with the lineage of post-rock bands surfaces. But it's only a brief moment before the vortex of darkness and electricity wraps everything back into eternal night. There's no escape from the black hole described by Neurosis: civilization as we know it is doomed. All that's left is the need to scream it out to whoever might still be able to hear it.

Stiv takes a breather with the brief "Shadow," where his cavernous voice intones a desolate tale over a drone that drags on aimlessly. "Hidden Faces" has all the hallmarks of a classic heavy track: riffs, tempo and power. Live, it'll become one of the band's warhorses. More dark, Sabbath-indebted riffs open "Distill," one of the album's later tracks. The two minutes of experimentation on "Nine" set up the grand finale of "Origin," 11 minutes and 49 seconds in which the best qualities of the Neurosis entity are condensed.

In 2012 Neurosis returned with Honor Found In Decay, and who knows whether the decay celebrated in the title is meant as an abstraction or as a statement on the state of the band circa 2012, turning it into something of an apologia. Back in 2003, the band had explored this same semantic territory with the collaboration of Jarboe – an inner decay, certainly – and since then the word has accompanied the Californians' music, taking on the meaning of twilight. A slow, irreversible but dignified twilight, just as this Honor Found In Decay ultimately proves to be dignified.

Here Neurosis play at being Neurosis, as if they were a fledgling band raised on the cult of Neurosis. The handwriting is the same as ever, but the depth and the ability to forge metal with the fire of the soul remain buried under a thick blanket of what by now is sheer Neurosis-esque cliché. The usual rabbit ("At The Well") pulled out of a rather airless hat of ideas stands out from the rest like an epitaph, and aside from a few of their trademark post-metal digressions, the other tracks sound as weary as a pack of gaunt horses lost in the desert.

And if decline carries with it a certain sick allure, let's hope Neurosis don't keep going down this road until it curdles into a parody of self-dissolution. The score below could be half a point lower, but a passing grade is the least owed as a sign of respect to one of the greatest outfits of the last thirty years of extreme music.

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