The Wycked Lady

The Salt Pale Collective – …and God said nothing

 

“They mix so many different stylistic elements and combine them in a myriad of constellations. There’s juxtaposition and contradiction in everything. The abrasive, guttural growls and punishing thunderous riffs are raw, bold, unfiltered emotion that may strike anytime unexpectedly, while the beauty of the soaring clean vocals and melodies contrast them perfectly. All vocal performances are sheer bliss on their own. Opposed, juxtaposed or harmonized they create a magical atmospheric depth.”

I simply “copypasted”(is that even a word?) this from my review of A Body That Could Pass Through Stones And Trees , because all this is also true for “…and God said nothing” (and maybe I’m lazy).

 

On  this album, that clocks in at 35 minutes and comprises six songs The Salt Pale Collective elaborated their unique blend of Doom, Death, Sludge, Post, Ambient, Noise and … whatever. Once again, they made an album bursting with creative ideas and a style that’s unmistakably their own.

Right from the start, the opening track “Raised aloft upon the horns of the celestial bull” establishes an uncanny, otherworldly uneasiness with a bundle of ambient, eerie sounds auguring some imminent disaster, accompanied by ethereal dreamlike chants, mumbled mourning words, all layered and stacked to build an intense depressive atmosphere. It takes about halfway through the song before this disaster pounds you into the boggy ground. And the destruction is complete.

 

This haunting uneasiness won’t leave you throughout the whole album, each song with different foci in atmosphere, mood and their musical layout. 

Be it the staggering and tumbling groove in the title track “…and God said nothing”, slowing down, ending in an unbalanced trudge of mental exhaustion, the majestic melodies, epic build up, the ethereal, almost lofty expanse, in “Our pale Madonna”, the choral delight between the progressive structures in “Litany for a dying son”, the clustered ambience  in the chaotic dirge-like “Ahoy! The black caskets”, or the slightly unhinged closing song “The stars fade and reel in confusion”, where the dirge seems to reach upwards to the universe, but the universe (or God)  still says nothing.

 

Each song shines on its own, but they build an entity by their haunting atmospheres, their deeply textured structures, of course their lyrical themes and, if nothing else, their vocal grandeur. 

 

 

Although I’m well familiar with The Salt Pale Collective’s debut album and their other releases too, after listening to …and God said nothing for the first time, I thought: WTF did I just listen to? But since I got hooked immediately and couldn’ stop playing it over and over again, I … still don’t know. 

What I know, though, is, that The Salt Pale Collective have crafted another masterpiece of experimental extreme music and perfected their approach to the genre stupendously. 

They perfected the layering and intertwining of melodies and sound, especially of the different vocal styles. The electronic elements and samples slide in like modules. And all this uncloses a multidude of dimensions. Like Schrödinger’s cat is dead and alive at the same time, here everything clashes and harmonizes concurrently. 

Utter cushing heavy brutality and fragile vulnarability don’t only collide, at times you can’t even tell them apart and offer varying shades of pain and despair as a consequence of the cosmic rejection.