Season to Risk's The Shattering will blow minds, and not with sheer volume. Opening with video-game-style bleeps that bleed into siren-wail guitars and ending with a sample-heavy fog that buries chirping birds in fizzy static, The Shattering merges the group's trademark anvil-drop rhythm section with electronic experimentation. With every member contributing synthesizer parts, the group produces everything from the poppy wee-ooh sound favored by The Get Up Kids to brutal industrial-style thuds.
Steve Tulipana's long-distorted vocals are finally free to breathe on several tracks, and the resulting songs ("Straight and Narrow," "Ace of Space") offer an appealing blend of hard-driving riffs and hazy melodies that's reminiscent of the Deftones' White Pony. But far from representing a new direction for the band, those tunes reflect its past. They were written in 1999, before the group's current lineup (Tulipana, drummer David Symth, guitarist Duane Trower and bassist Billy Smith) solidified. The newer material capitalizes on the expanded guitar repertoire of Trower and the songwriting experience of Smith, who became the first member of Season to Risk other than Tulipana to write lyrics for one of the group's songs. (That tune, the eerily effective "Last Breath Aboard," ends with an overlapping chant of "S.O.S." that loses form and fades into a blur of hisses and moans.)
"Last Breath Aboard" communicates haunting desperation, but "Or Highwater" is The Shattering's spookiest song. Over a spare, barely moving backdrop, Tulipana gurgles his vocals in a morose deadpan that recalls the hellish delivery of Type O Negative's Peter Steele. His duet partner, former Babes in Toyland screamer Kat Bjelland, sounds like a horror-movie witch whispering a warning that wafts through a darkened forest, barely loud enough to rustle the leaves but instantly chilling. The final product might have been even more sinister, but the group decided against using a track on which Bjelland mimicked Tulipana's demonic bass. "It was creepy and weird, but it didn't fit," Tulipana explains.
Season to Risk hasn't yet decided how to recreate "Or Highwater" for its live show, but it has found a way to add "Despair" to its set list. Filled with ghostly keyboards and jarring metallic crashes, "Despair" plays like the soundtrack to a documentary about a haunted factory. Its electronically manufactured core resulted from an extended improvisation session in the studio, but instead of attempting to reassemble it on stage, the group will confine its clamor to an unsequenced sample loop. (Tulipana explains that the band will cue the sample manually, running it for as long or short as it likes, instead of playing to a preset click track.)
But for the most part, The Shattering's ambience shouldn't be too difficult to recapture on stage during the band's CD release party at The Hurricane on Saturday, August 25. Even more impressive than its electronic wizardry is the way Season to Risk uses organic instruments to achieve industrial-style effects. The guitars grind to a halt on "Mono Fuego" like a machine gradually shutting down; the bassline of "National Gomorrah" gurgles like a vat of toxic liquid; the riffs on "Demand" plunge up and down like the elastic arm of some monotonous assembly-line device. The group's last album proclaimed Men are Monkeys, Robots Win -- The Shattering sees Season to Risk mimicking machinery to achieve its own convincing victory.
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