ORTHODOX - Amanecer En Puerta Oscura

Last year it was “Gran Poder”, a dark, orgiastic monolith of metallic slowness. This year it's “Amanecer En Puerta Oscura”, a further step in redefining doom, with jazz at its heart (among others, they claim inspiration from none other than his holiness John Coltrane…), an obsessive making and unmaking of a “material” musical body; in short, the dream of a progressive jazz-doom that splits in two the evolution of a genre that's never been tamed, underground and intensely vital.

There are three of them, their identities are mysterious, and they come from Seville: Orthodox. And they seem fully intent on meaning business, today more than ever. They bring with them a music of distance (both historical and psychological): the origins of Christianity, the “pain” of conquering new socio-cultural spaces, the ferocity of an orthodoxy that breaks the back of every form of heresy. But it's also – and perhaps above all – the distance from which a powerful, epic sound originates, charged with spiritualistic emphasis. That's why, when the drums seem to come together and then veer off course in the intro of “Con Sangre De Quien Te Ofenda”, the performance ends up releasing a mysterious blend of Morricone-esque flavors and colors (collective memory, the cinematic sense of life), while everything seems to transfigure into a melancholy frontier epic: trumpet and clarinet over the abyss of countless mariachi sagas, the silenced dust, like a shroud in the wind.

The clearest image, then, is that of a frame that would like to become a metaphor for the ungraspable, but which ends up paying the price of a planetary desolation (the title track), with the abyss of silence awaiting, sooner or later, the annihilation of the music (“Puerta Osario”, with its chilling, pounded piano). From this point of view, then, the 15 ecstatic and mysterious minutes of “Templos” end up taking on a truly unprecedented meaning. A liquid, infinite reverberation of notes (perhaps drawn out a little too long…), with the relentless, hypnotic contraction of the double bass and the ghostly calls of the clarinet. The cymbals flutter luminescent, projecting themselves beyond dusk, the ideal “place” toward which this music slowly converges. One senses echoes of unhealthy ritualism, whispers of parallel worlds that recall the “darkest” pages of Aphrodite's Child (look under the heading “666”) and Ligeti-esque transcendences (another of their guiding spirits).
“Templos” is the lyricism of exhausting waiting. The soundtrack accompanying faceless prisoners to their calvary.

“Mesto, Rigido e Cerimoniale”, on the other hand, is doom solemnity as we've come to know it after the pivotal experience of Earth. But it's a legacy that becomes multifaceted, further enriching the apocalyptic drone dilemma with sharp, noisy nuances (what marvelous, vivid guitar arabesques!; such power from the triangulations with the drums! The blinding delirium of chaos…): facets of a crystal reflecting decades of experience and sound, in search of the triumph of heaviness, of the heaviness of emotional triumph.

Elsewhere, the appearance of vocals and the accelerated tempos in “Solemne Triduo” raise the level of anguish. The impact becomes less hypnotic, but the noisy blanket ends up attacking with a truly satanic stance (like Black Sabbath holding a coven of witches). In the same way, the desperate race, toward some unspecified point in the cosmos, of the closing “Parte II. Apogeum” draws its vital energy from a mad, possessed need to outdo the competition, to break through, once and for all, the “dark door”, opening a path toward the dawn.

The way is clear. “Amanecer En Puerta Oscura” is one of the most important albums of the year. Now, we can expect anything.

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06/11/2007