The Tower stands sturdy and silent. Its construction is bizarre, almost alien. Great pillars jut out chaotically from some uncertain core. The structure seems to have neglected the ground and chose the sky as its foundation. Rays of stark light play off its jagged angles, creating bright gray highlights and deep shadows in striking chiaroscuro. It’s stark and rugged, but also oddly beautiful and life affirming in its strange architecture. Standing at its base, two thoughts cross the observer’s mind: first, that scaling this monstrosity is not going to be easy. And second, that the view from the top will be more than worth the journey.
Australia’s experimental metal unit Bolt Gun could hardly have picked a better title and album cover to helm The Tower, their third album. It perfectly signals the band’s monolithic and deeply unique sound before you ever click the play button. Stylistically, it could perhaps be described as a sort of blackened post-metal, but that doesn’t do full justice to the pool of influences Bolt Gun draws from. Besides second wave black metal and post-rock, Bolt Gun has taken many cues from the ambient and noise genres, and has also named bands such as Bohren & der Club of Gore and Locrian among The Tower‘s most vital influences. Hell, even the album cover itself suggests a more brutalist, noir answer to the futuristic mirrored sculpture that adorns Locrian‘s Infinite Dissolution, an album that likewise demands focus and patience from listeners while rewarding in kind.
Across The Tower’s run-time, Bolt Gun manages to balance out a sense of deliberate musical world-building with a sense of rapid, unsettling mood changes. Opening title track “The Tower” fades in slowly like darkness creeping up around the sunset, and quickly introduces the band’s penchant for ambient negative space and tasteful saxophone to both contrast and complement the harsher metallic stretches to come. Distortion bleeds in slowly over several minutes, giving plenty of opportunity for listeners to immerse themselves long before the trudging riffs, soaring lead lines that any post-rock band would envy, and harrowing vocals make themselves known. And even when they do, the band follows that by immediately dropping back to quiet atmosphere with soaring saxophone for several minutes, before suddenly shifting again to a brief charge of furious black metal heralding the slow stomp of the final riff.
One of the greatest strengths across The Tower, signposted wonderfully in the first track, is Bolt Gun’s loose compositional style that values improvisation. The tracks are not wholly rigid in approach, moods and intensities can shift at a moment’s notice, and the band is just as likely to jump into glistening ambiance from a black metal charge as it is to follow a conventional path. As a listener, I find that style thrilling. Emotional highs can hit at any given moment and subside just as fast, giving those peaks an honesty and power that bands with similar approaches fail to achieve with a carefully plotted buildup.
While the music can be wildly unpredictable, the overall structure of this album is too perfect to be unplanned. The aforementioned title track sets the stage perfectly with its shifts between serene ambiance and metallic heaviness, only to be rendered darker and more dynamic across the second track (“The Vulture”, namely). As the album progresses, the ambient moments get louder and more uneasy. The saxophone, initially a calming presence, shows up in more intense passages, wailing louder and more wildly as the album goes on. Discomfort peaks with the full-on static and harsh noise undercurrent of “The Scapegoat.” Mournful leads only provide some respite from the song scraping along to its desolate conclusion before the sudden drop into “A Faint Red Glow” closes the album on a shockingly beautiful, soothing note of warm synths glimmering like the first rays of dawn and saxophone fluttering like the songs of the early birds. It’s cathartic, and deeply moving.
Thematically, The Tower is rooted in concepts the concepts of nihilism, isolation, and extinction, and the music reflects these themes expertly. The ever-building pressure Bolt Gun creates here does evoke a crushing sense of claustrophobic dread from the world around us that calls to mind the pressurized descent of The Ocean’s stellar album Pelagial, but made much harsher. And yet, the album ending on such a serene, peaceful note does evoke a feeling that somewhere, someday, there is hope for a peaceful world. The only question is whether we’ll be around to see it or not.
Across the board, the performances Bolt Gun’s members put forth here are stellar. In particular, I need to praise the rhythm section. Drummer Robin Stone puts on an absolute masterclass of a drum performance, blasting away in the most intense moments with ease while opening up and waxing dazzlingly jazzy when it’s her time to shine. Seriously, the intro solo of “The Sacred Deer” is the most I’ve enjoyed a drum solo in a metal album in a very long time. Likewise, the bass playing of Valent Macukat anchors so many moments with its crushing, tectonic, oddly melodic style. Vocalist A.T.’s harrowing screams would be the envy of any DSBM band worth its salt, the guitar performance from Jon Vayla is beautifully evocative and scathing in equal measures, and Claire Keet’s saxophone is an absolute highlight every single time it appears.
To point out flaws with this album would be very difficult. If anything, I could only really mention that the guitars don’t always seem to have the heft they deserve in the mix. By and large, the production is suitably vast and open, but some of the more chaotic sections can get a little bit suffocating. From a thematic standpoint, this does make sense, but it’s not always easy to pick out the subtleties that the band is weaving through the dense sound. And, I suppose, this really is a niche kind of metal album that requires an investment from the listener to unlock its full rewards, but I’d safely assume anybody who would actually track down a band like Bolt Gun, read the influences, and give it a couple spins would likely get a world of enjoyment out of them.
In some odd way, the experience of listening through The Tower made me think back to Disembowelment‘s Transcendence Into the Peripheral (coincidentally, my favorite Australian metal album ever made). They aren’t necessarily similar sounding albums, but neither really sounds like anything else I’ve ever heard. Both are cerebral offerings, somewhat amorphous in structure, and can be challenging to approach. But given time, they reveal themselves as outstanding metal albums with an abundance to give. Time will tell if Bolt Gun manages to earn that same lifelong love from me as their elder countrymen. As it stands though, this album has wowed in a way that not a lot of metal has this year. I have ascended The Tower, looked around me, I found it to be a journey that is well worth taking.
