As much as I love post metal, I won’t deny that the genre has no shortage of color-by-numbers acts that regurgitate the same few influences. I’ll admit, this isn’t always a dealbreaker for me. I’ve heard and enjoyed a number of albums that might as well have been subtitled “A Study in Russian Circles,” and even purchased a number of them—such is my hunger for heavy guitars and dark atmospheres.
With that in mind, when a post metal act releases something that looks beyond the scope of the overworked soil tilled up by Isis, Cult of Luna, and Russian Circles and replanted by just about every other band in the genre since, the results are truly fresh.
Take for instance Migration, the second full length from Kent, England’s Bossk. It draws enough from the conventions of post metal to pass the smell test, but it infuses those flavors with generous bits of seasoning from trip hop, industrial, and hardcore.
The results is one of the most inventive and rewarding post metal albums of the last few years.
I was first introduced to Bossk when a promo for this album came through the inbox for Tuned Up, the other site I write for. Being a shameless post metal stan, I claimed it almost by reflex.
When I first put it on, I had a decent idea of what to expect from the press release, and the opening moments didn’t bring any surprises: “White Stork” opens with an ambient wash of distant electric guitars almost struggling to be heard through the layers of echo effects. I’ve been conditioned by years of listening to post metal to expect the bass and drums to build this delicate atmosphere into punishing riffs, so imagine my surprise when those amorphous guitars were instead joined by a piano and drum machine that felt more expected from Massive Attack than Neurosis.
However, any doubts that this is a proper post metal album are thwarted by the following track “Menhir,” which features guest vocals from none other than Cult of Luna frontman Johannes Persson. Here, they play it straight and heavy, proving to any Philistines who may have said, “puh, this is trip hop, not post metal” that they have just as much muscle as any of their contemporaries. “HTV-3,” featuring clean and screamed vocals from Palm Reader’s Josh McKeown, is especially rich, melding pensie industrial, brooding sludge metal, and furious post-hardcore across its six-and-a-half minutes.
While the two tracks with guest vocals have gotten all the press, there isn’t a moment on this disc that drags the record down. Of particular note though is the incredible nine-and-a-half-minute post metal opus “Lira,” which climaxes with one of last year’s heaviest riffs. So heavy, in fact, that “Unberth” seems to spend much of it’s eight-and-a-half minutes catching its breath in a fog of echo-laden guitars, swirling synths, and bursts of white noise. There’s no percussion for the first nearly five minutes, then it rides the rest of the album on another expert mixture of post metal’s nocturnal atmospheres and trip hop’s midtempo grooves.
Trust me when I tell you I have a lot of records that use a lot of the same sort of atmospheric, heavy aesthetics. It’s no secret that I have a great weakness for this sort of thing. But as deep as the post metal/post rock/post whatever section of my record shelf is, I’m not sure I have anything else that feels as inventive and rewarding as this does. I was so instantly enraptured on my first listen ahead of its release that I ordered a cassette copy, hoping to the metal gods that a vinyl edition would follow. And now that it has, this is going to spend a whole lot of time on my turntable.