If you think back to BRUIT ≤‘s last legendary album, you can remember just how big the scope of instrumental music can get both in sound and mood, especially of a post- nature. A lot of albums, bands, and genres play with these metrics of course, but one of the last times I really had to contend with that was with BRUIT ≤ and also Five The Hierophant, whose personally legendary album Through Aureate Void also came out the same year. They really capture an almost noir-like sense of shadowy dark, a smallness in the sprawl of urban life where streets are either packed and crowded or ghostly in their emptiness – no in-between. But there was also an astral quality to it all, expansive and boundless.
That last word is especially important for today as that’s what Apeiron means in Greek. Since Five The Hierophant are boundless in a spatial and genre sense, anything goes with them. I mean, you won’t hear thrash riffs from them, I don’t think, and you can count on them summoning some particular moods with great consistency, but even still they run the gamut of sound. Doom, jazz, doomjazz, post-rock, post-metal, ambient, a smidge of noise, progressive rock – the web casts far and wide, but it’s like the band really pushed themselves to craft something truly, remarkably memorable and focused with Apeiron.
From the opening seconds of the album with the title track, things feel familiar and yet the pacing is much different, less meandering. Twenty seconds is all it takes for the first saxophone melody to materialize and bore into your brain like a monochrome lobotomy. The movement is fiercely effective, a nice mid-tempo that still has a tranquility to it because of the humming sax and groovy bass. There’s a density that grows, though, and about a third of the way through, things clamor for your attention but never get too unruly. Five The Hierophant are well-mannered after all.
“Moon Over Ziggurat” is similarly structured with an earworm melody out of the gate, but it uses eight minutes to riff on that melody and the tones established in the first track. This time, things are done more mysteriously in the night as the name implies where “Apeiron” was more adventurous and bold, lit clearly with light reflecting off the wet cobblestone streets. There’s a West Asian/Middle Eastern touch to this track with the saxophone and guitars that enhances it, but it’s subtle enough to avoid tacky exoticism. This is true alleyway neon sign dark jazz with a rumbling stomach. I absolutely adore the playfulness that happens with all the instruments about 4:30 into this song.
If you want more ‘classic’ Five The Hierophant, “Tower of Silence I” and “Tower of Silence II” are where you need to be. Track three and six respectively, they offer a more foreboding abstract structure to jut out and over Apeiron‘s resplendent melodies and fiery soul. There’s an unease in each tower – instruments wobble, pause and resume at will, and there’s a near-constant moan that’s anything but silent. It’s like BIG|BRAVE infiltrated Five The Hierophant‘s studio session, but it still feels like it belongs to the band’s usual work with a ritualistic dedication to sound. “Tower of Silence II” especially feels destitute, marked by reverberating, pulsing bass that reminds me of the original Metroid theme song, and just like that theme, you get a sense of cosmic dread, like you’re isolated in vast blackness. They’re also suspiciously the shortest tracks on the album which begs the question, what makes these songs so abrupt comparatively? Do these ominous towers consume us and the world around? The deep, hollow bellowing toward the end of “Tower of Silence II” may have the answer.
The other two songs on here are approachable and alluring just as “Apeiron” and “Moon Over Ziggurat” were. “Initiatory Sickness” was the first single and what tipped me off to the fact that this album was going to be a special moment for Five The Hierophant. It’s driven by percussion and contains the album’s biggest, loudest climax at its core, a fight-or-flight response if the band were a post-jazz animal – they are. Still, it collects itself to build on everything before with huge instrumentation and the guitars buzz here the most, or maybe that’s just my ears buckling under Apeiron‘s collective weight. Either way, “Uroboros” is a salve, a stealthy weave through the shadows wearing a cloak of reverb and descending melodies that accentuate the secretive feel of this track. Love the tambourine or whatever small percussive instrument is being used as well. Longest track here and it earns every minute by expertly folding in on itself with refrains, but also offering change-ups and eruptive crescendos to keep it dynamic and rich like high percentage, salty cacao.
Apeiron just happens to capitalize on everything that made Five The Hierophant stand out to me and everyone else that was able to check out their earlier work. They’re up there with The Physics House Band as a group that takes jazz tenets and marries them so well to psychedelic, dark, and progressive moods to create entire worlds with the bricks each note provides. Every song is a landscape painting with handcrafted detail, dense references, and the most striking set pieces that won’t leave your mind for days to come, your eye finding new paths through the valleys of colors each time you look at it. It’s modernized art nouveau robed in obsidian. Personally, this was such an aural treat to break up the monotony that comes with reviewing a lot of more straightforward metal nowadays – I love that, but music like this has a very specific texture and vibrancy to it that acts as a cultivated, experiential foil to the rawness that other heavy music has. For someone like me, and hopefully you, it’s something you can’t see yourself living without.
Band photo by Adam Laycock
