Gathering

Some albums are so unclassifiable that they demand a category all their own. Straddling the late Nineties and the early 2000s, Dutch outfit The Gathering released a whole series of them: border-crossing records, suspended between multiple genres yet possessed of an extremely cohesive sound and unmistakable atmospheres. Some tried to pin down their style using established labels (“gothic metal”, “alternative rock”, “experimental”) or more esoteric coinages (“psychedelic metal”, “atmospheric rock”, or “trip-rock”, as the band themselves suggested), but none of it really stuck. The music was enough on its own, capable of satisfying fans of harder sounds as much as classic rock devotees and curious listeners coming from “alternative” territory or drifting in from electronic music. The Gathering were undoubtedly a niche name, but an unusually broad-reaching niche in terms of the audiences it drew in.

Years later, that highly personal, eclectic style finally found a home: post-progressive rock. It's a label still in the process of establishing itself, first introduced back in 1998 by philosopher and musicologist Bill Martin (in “Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock”) but which really spread from 2008 onward with the founding of the label Kscope, closely tied to Steven Wilson. Scholars Martin Halliwell and Paul Hegarty frame this heterogeneous field as “that progressive rock which draws its origins from sources other than progressive rock itself” (“Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock Since the 1960s”, 2001). Within it you'll find plenty of otherwise “uncategorizable” artists: David Sylvian and late-period Talk Talk, Archive and post-Fish Marillion, No-Man, Blackfield, several Radiohead albums, Oceansize, Amplifier, Airbag, Elbow, Gazpacho, Dredg… as well as a number of artists who emerged from the metal scene but, right around the turn of the millennium, opened their sound up to a plurality of influences: Anathema, Katatonia, Tiamat, Ulver, Manes and others besides. Among them, The Gathering, who in February 2003 released one of the movement's most emblematic records: “Souvenirs”, put out in Europe on their own label Psychonaut and in the United States through The End Records (home to Agalloch, Estradasphere, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Ulver, Sigh, Today Is The Day).

It would be inaccurate to call “Souvenirs” the peak of the Dutch band's career, or to say it marks a clear before-and-after in their discography. Ever since their gothic/doom debut “Always” (1992), The Gathering's story has been one continuous stylistic evolution through carefully crafted, consistently convincing releases: trying to single out a qualitative high point would be misleading. Their seventh album does, however, offer a privileged vantage point on their transformations, sitting at the crossroads of the many facets of their sound: the gothic streak, always evident in the atmospheres and in Anneke van Giersbergen's enveloping voice; the central role of the guitars, by now more alternative rock than metal and often filtered through shoegaze-style effects; the internalized influence of Massive Attack's electric/electronic constructions; and a taste for expansiveness, for dynamics that gradually thicken and thin out.

As Alessandro Mattedi writes in his monograph on the Dutch band, “The sound sheds every last riff-centric residue, growing subtler but also darker and more psychologically fraught, especially in the lyrics. […] 'Souvenirs' is perhaps the darkest and most inspired album the band had made up to that point.” Indeed, the tones of these songs are probably the most washed-out and claustrophobic the band ever explored. The slow entrance of “These Good People”, which opens the record, sets the dominant mood: an intoxicating stagnation that conceals tensions perpetually seeking some purifying resolution. Hypnotic bass, dripping piano, electronic loops and a trip-hop drum pattern built largely around rim clicks and rim shots (the sharp or clattering sounds produced by striking the rim of the snare) are the key ingredients of a piece that alternates emptiness and density without ever arriving at a real, resolving explosion.

A fondness for gradual transitions through emotional states is central to most of the album's other tracks too (it's crucial, for instance, in “Broken Glass”, in the title track, and in “We Just Stopped Breathing”), but it's not just a defining trait of this album or of “the Gathering sound”. Rather, it's a distinctive feature of a great many bands now associated with the post-progressive label. Building evocative atmospheres and arranging them into sequential architectures is the most obvious point of contact with Seventies-style progressive rock (at least in its best-known, symphonic guise); bands like The Gathering, Archive or Hogarth-era Marillion, however, rarely go for the “surprise effect” produced by abrupt shifts in tempo, instrumentation, key or intensity. Virtuosic flourishes are rare too, and the overall architecture seems closer to the layering of Pink Floyd than to the sudden about-turns that, back in the day, earned Yes or Genesis the nickname “flash-rock”. What drives the music forward are quiet entrances and fade-outs, blurred transitions where no seam is ever visible. The listener ends up immersed in a flow of sensations, feeling its inexorable pull without ever being able to point to a precise turning point. In place of sharply defined divisions, at best, one can only sketch out a rough map of the currents at work.

In those very same years, the equally progressive-minded “soft/loud” strand led by Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Rós was also developing a devotion to crescendo-based structures and to the “weather-system” unfolding of their compositional interplay. While there are plenty of points of connection between the two approaches, one key difference lies in how tension is handled: where soft/loud bands tend to lean on strong dynamic shifts and explicit sonic detonations, provoking a strong emotional response in the listener, The Gathering's approach — and that of others working in a similar vein — is more indirect. Their music captivates through a play of thickening and clouding-over that hints at a storm which is almost always deferred, evolving instead into new disturbances through rarefaction and subtle shifts in instrumental texture.

Beyond the traits it shares with other post-prog artists, The Gathering's path has its own distinct inclinations, clearly visible in the tracklist of “Souvenirs”. Their trip-hop leanings connect them to the aforementioned Archive, but also to a significant source of inspiration: Norway's The 3rd And The Mortal, whose trajectory from doom metal to electronic, ambient-tinged art-rock may be less progressive in its blend of influences, but is certainly no less fascinating. Many of the rhythmic constructions put together by drummer Hans Rutten and bassist Hugo Prinsen Geerlings betray the dub-inflected approach typical of Bristol a few years earlier. “Even The Spirits Are Afraid”, in particular, opens with a two-bar drum pattern and a pulsing bassline strongly reminiscent of Massive Attack circa “Mezzanine”/”100th Window” (the latter also from 2003). Elsewhere, echoes of Portishead surface, and the grey, suburban tones of many tracks certainly help reinforce that connection.

Anneke Van Giersbergen's vocal presence is a second, undeniably defining feature. Her charismatic delivery is responsible, on one hand, for the most persistent goth leanings of the Gathering sound, and on the other, for the rare but crucial pop openings. The light-and-shadow contrast that emerges between these two tendencies marks the album's two most-streamed tracks (at least according to Spotify): “Broken Glass” and “You Learn About It”. Both carry a mood less grim than usual: the first explores the more dynamic side of the band's palette (it contains one of the album's few genuinely cathartic sections); the second, thanks to its radiant acoustic guitar, edges toward tones reminiscent of The Cranberries and is easily the brightest song of this stretch of the Dutch band's career.

Perhaps also in search of less niche horizons, after the follow-up “Home” the singer left the band to focus on her private life and solo output. Her recording history with The Gathering had begun back in 1994 with “Mandylion”.

Despite the move away from metal, the gothic sensibility remains an important part of the overall stylistic balance, surfacing not only in the vocals and their frequent reverb, but also in the instrumental textures. Keyboardist Frank Boeijen's piano and synths are often tasked with conjuring shadowy atmospheres, as in “We Just Stopped Breathing”, “Golden Grounds” or the coda of “Jelena”. René Rutten's guitars, too, almost always sounding closer to alternative rock than metal, with their heavy use of effects, bring back to the surface the threads linking them to the shoegaze lineage and to godfathers of dark aesthetics like the Cocteau Twins.

What keeps a direct link to metal alive, on the other hand, is the lyrics. Brooding, at times cryptic and often steeped in existential dilemmas, they touch on themes like hatred, choice and the absence of happiness (“These Good People”), the distance and insatiability of people (“Monsters”), decay and the loss of one's bearings (“Debris”, a bonus track taken from the previous year's EP, and included on some editions of the album since 2003). The lyrics are mostly written by Anneke Van Giersbergen, but on two occasions the credit goes to producer Zlaya Hadzich, who had been working with the Dutch band since 2000 and here also co-wrote the music on every track.

Hadzich also made a significant contribution in terms of the sheer breadth of guests involved. In those very years, the engineer and producer was overseeing, for the Amsterdam label Konkurrent, the recordings of the "In The Fishtank" series, which paired artists of very different backgrounds in spontaneous sessions (the post-rock of Tortoise alongside the in opposition avant-rock of The Ex, the slowcore of Low and the gothic folk of Dirty Three, the math-rock of Solbakken and the dark indie-folk of Black Heart Procession…). It was probably out of those recordings that the connection with trumpeter Mathias Eick was born, featured on the track "We Just Stopped Breathing": the member of Norwegian post-rockers Jaga Jazzist had worked with Hadzich just back in 2002, on the "In The Fishtank" installment recorded together with Motorpsycho.

Also appearing on "We Just Stopped Breathing" is beatmaker Kid Sublime, while on "These Good People" and "You Learn About It" the acoustic guitar is courtesy of Wouter Planteijdt of Sjako!, veterans of the Dutch independent rock scene. The closing "A Life All Mine", finally, is a duet between Anneke Van Giersbergen and the singer of Ulver, Arcturus and Borknagar, Kristoffer Rygg: a noir-tinged episode that nonetheless stands out as one of the most hopeful on the album ("A life all mine/ Is what I choose/ At the end of my days").

Absent from the streaming version of the album, the hidden track "Telson" attempts, in just two minutes, to synthesize several of the experimental directions at play on "Souvenirs". There's trip-hop (here pushed to an extreme in an electronic guise that recalls the Radiohead of "Kid A"/"Amnesiac"), there are gothic touches in the voice, the piano and the hazy keyboards. There's also, in the reversed tapes that take center stage, an echo of the band's own take on psychedelia as explored around the time of "How To Measure A Planet?". What's entirely missing, however, is the rock/metal element.

Fortunately, it wasn't a programmatic statement: on the following "Home", and even more so on "The West Pole" (the first album with new singer Silje Wergeland), the guitars took on even greater centrality, combining moreover with surprisingly sun-lit atmospheres within their unmistakable melancholy. Although Gathering never gained a truly large following, their journey of expanding into new styles and expressive possibilities never came to a halt.

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12/02/2023