Colossloth
Plague Alone
SCORE: 8.5 out of 10
Colossloth brings an album that shatters the listener with mechanized metallic sounds and an overall ethereal sense of angst. As jarring as it can be, the way Plague Alone unfolds is extremely graceful; the songs seep into each other with an elegant flow, gently carrying the listener from one track to the next with undeniable sensitivity.
There’s no other way to put it: this is a prophetic piece of work. From the album title to its overall sense of dread, melancholy and despair, Plague Alone feels like it was made for these times, and yet, it was ready before the whole pandemic situation seethed into the very core of what made our lives normal and turned it into an even uglier version of its former self. This makes the already powerful songs on this album erupt tenfold, shattering the listener with mechanized metallic sounds and an overall ethereal sense of angst. If someone would have told Wooly Woolaston -the person behind this project- that he would end up providing the soundtrack to a global pandemic, he may have just shrugged it off as a joke alluding to the bleakness of this LP.
Right from the start, Colossloth warps and morphs our surroundings, transporting us to a decaying world, where rusty and barely functioning machines, painfully struggle to move from one point to the other. It is a grim landscape, but some light is able to break in every now and then, giving some color to this desolate scene. “Little Cups of Grace” begins feeling like a nightmare, but its rumbling and deafening repetition gives way to a softer timbre to pierce through the mix, eventually taking over the whole piece; the transition feels like if we finally were able to wake up, but this maddening descent is just beginning.
As jarring as it can be, the way Plague Alone unfolds is extremely graceful. The songs seep into each other with an elegant flow, gently carrying the listener from one track to the next with undeniable sensitivity, a feature that -as good as they are- not many noise or industrial albums have; it’s as if we’re being cautiously guided through hell. This dichotomy is handled by Woolaston with enviable ease.
Experimental music will always have an inherent random feel to it, but Plague Alone doesn’t feel like a loosely improvised number, where the effects’s settings lead the way. There’s coherence and purpose in every movement and every turn; they feel like the result of choice rather than chance. Nonetheless, these are still abstract pieces, and for the most part, their textures are piercing and harsh, but when Woolaston transitions to cleaner passages -like the beautiful arpeggio in the titular track- it never feels sudden or abrupt; like a good director creating suspense, Colossloth hints at incoming change, but it is not easy to guess what’s coming around the corner.
With that in mind, the direction this album takes as we drown further into its enthralling depths is unexpected but logical, and yet, it is not predictable. From “Scylla is Rising” and onwards, Plague Alone trades its chaotic pulses for cavernous textures and shiny overtones without losing the ominous vibe it had been creating all along; this helps alleviate the piling tension and gives us room to breathe. A song like “Silt” even returns to its initial guitar arpeggio providing closure after its long run, which also helps us cope with the linear structure of most of the other pieces.
Some of the solidness is lost in the last track, since it does feel more random than the rest, but it still creates a compelling conclusion to this experience with very touching harmonic choices accompanying an acoustic guitar in the second half of this massive piece; however, describing how this song actually ends would feel like spoiling a very interesting movie. Let’s just say that, even when repeating dynamics, Woolaston knows how to give them a different flare each time and it is so satisfying.
It’s difficult to say if the noisier parts are more enthralling than the softer ones because they just complement each other so well; without its peaceful passages, Plague Alone would have been just another industrial noise record -albeit a pretty good one-, and without its throbbing, guttural pulses and punishing static hissing, it might have been just a -very- good dark ambient LP. I would have taken it either way, as that wouldn’t have diminished its quality, but I’m glad Colossloth decided to take this route, even if that meant going through hell and back. It was worth it.
