#primitive man

In at least one other way, Observance is a return to form. After a 39-minute “EP” (Insurmountable, from 2022) and a 36-minute LP (Immersion, from 2020 — and good luck doping out the parameters of EPs and LPs from those examples), this new record sprawls across 68 minutes, just a minute or so longer than Caustic, the 2017 LP that brought the band to more national attention. The songs stretch out into that sprawl: among them “Transactional” at 14 minutes, “Devotion” at 12, “Social Contract” at 11. Slow, massive, perversely heavy—the songs do not compromise.

But there are noticeable contrasts with Caustic, a terrific record that impressed through the sheer force of its ugliness. See for instance the middle section of “Transactional,” which emerges from a characteristic (and hugely satisfying) bout of sludgy pummeling. Around the song’s halfway point, Ethan McCarthy’s guitar begins to emit a set of shimmering effects, on top of the blunt riffage. Soon that shimmer opens into a tonal space that recalls Sonic Youth, deep into tracks like “Mote” or “Karen Revisited.” It’s not tuneful or pretty, but it has an aesthetic quality that can only be called beautiful. A terrible beauty, perhaps, but beauty all the same.

The depths of “Natural Law” are not nearly so musical. The driving riff is relentless, violent, full of ill intent. But in the final four minutes, another teasingly melodic solo arrives, tempering the song’s abandon. The fact that the listener needs to endure the previous ten minutes of horrific hollering and the abuse doled out by the band’s bottom end (Jonathan Campos, who also plays in the brilliantly demented Black Curse, and Joe Linden) in order to encounter those final minutes makes them that much more thrilling, on the margins of the sublime.

It's an interesting maneuver, issuing this relatively (again, that’s a potent adverb in this context) more approachable record in socio-cultural conditions that are so full of resentment and misery. You can’t characterize Observance as a vehicle of escape into an artistic elsewhere, but there may be some wisdom in deriving moments of beauty from struggle with these heavy, heavy times.