ALBUM REVIEW: Breathless Spirit – Völur & Cares
Are guitars necessary to create heavy doom? That is a question that VÖLUR have spent over a decade responding to with an emphatic no. The Canadian trio, based in Toronto, may be scaffolded with bass and drums, but guitars are replaced instead with string and woodwind instruments. Genre-wise, VÖLUR also confound, bringing in elements of folk and chamber music, post-rock, and a touch of jazz influence to create a melting pot of avant-garde sound.
Their past few releases have seen the band team up with a range of collaborators as part of the ongoing Die Sprachen Der Vögel (The Language of Birds) series. Their fourth full-length album, Breathless Spirit, began life as another instalment of the series, giving joint billing to CARES, the brainchild of Ontario-based experimental musician and producer James Beardmore. The collaboration gestated over an extended five-year period into a whole album of heft and depth.
Opening track Hearth begins acoustically and with an ominous sense of dread. There are field recordings of rain, interjected with the mournful laments of Lucas Gadke‘s double bass and Laura C. Bates‘s violins and violas, marched at a funereal tempo by sparse drum work. The sonic contributions of CARES pitch through the traditional instruments, manifest in those captured recordings, rumbles of background distortion, and ambient background layers that ramp into a cacophonic wall of sound for its close.
Windbourne Sorcery I draws heavily on Persian influences in its melody, driven by the lighter string instruments alongside a jangly tanbur. Its traditional arrangement is, at first, augmented by choral vocal support, and then undercut through the band’s trademark layers of distortion applied to the violin, a unique screeching wail. The heavy sustain combined with crashing drums comes across as an unhinged electric guitar solo, a mesmerising effect put to repeated use throughout the album.
Breathless Spirit cements those doom credentials across its two central tracks. Windbourne Sorcery II hits upon a torturous earworm of a riff from its opening moments, distortion layers built upon with wah-pedal effects on the violin. It softens into the first proper vocals of the album, bass clarinet and ambient weirdness accompanying a lower register voice in an island of calm. It then returns to that momentous riff, now supported with black metal shrieks of fury. One of the best elements of the album is its adept handling of outros – subtle layerings and drum escalations deployed to make the sound viscerally heavier with each metronomic iteration.
The title track continues the heaviness, opening with growled vocals and a gnarly stop-start riff pattern. But it quickly gives way to piano work from CARES, a swing feel and a dual male-female vocal melody of nursery rhyme simplicity. It’s one of many flourishes that set apart VÖLUR here – there is a grounded sense of belonging to the stylistic changes, not simply worn as gimmicks, but essential to the sound. Once again, it closes on wailing solos and a wall of noise that rivals anything involving six strings and a plectrum.
VÖLUR & CARES are careful not to let the album outstay its welcome. On Drangey returns to a chamber instrumental palette, drawing on Middle Eastern melodies, all flutters and clever ambient bass work in its slow builds and releases. Album closer Death in Solitude begins with more field recording work before finding a heavy two-note droning pattern at a doom metal pace. It folds in all of the elements of those centrepiece two tracks – growls, escalations, and a grounded sense of viscerality that is Breathless Spirit‘s calling card.
The pairing of VÖLUR & CARES is an emphatic success; the thunderous doom credentials of the former elevated by the experimental, offbeat flourishes of the latter. They’re hardly the first bands to explore the avant-garde space of doom and heaviness with folk and classical instruments, and the formula here begins to feel repetitive by the end. Yet the immaculate craft of Breathless Spirit can and should win fans beyond those already sold on experimental arrangements – especially in its best moments of memorable riffs and post-rock worthy crescendo.
Rating: 8/10
Breathless Spirit is out now via Batke Records
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