ALBUM REVIEW: Corpse Lights – Barrens

BARRENS are back to expand on their debut record Penumbra with the celestial Corpse Lights. There’s promise of beauty, cosmic dread and hope in the face of desolation.

Static crispness is how our journey begins with Memory Eraser, a blank and contemplative start the gives very little away. A swift drop tone in however, feels decidedly ominous as Memory Eraser bleeds into the drilling guitars and focused beat of The Derelict. The ambience has moved from low, thoughtful sombre to concentrated, intentional drive. It’s lush with atmosphere, this ambience not overworked or overcrowded. A warm of fuzz grumbles throughout The Derelict, generally setting the scene for what’s to come.

Oddly titled given its overall feel, Sorrowed is slightly lighter in tone, the landscape is lush and agreeable. Bright, dissonant tones delicately slip in alongside the main cacophony, growing greater as more battling elements rush to join the fray.

We head next towards Periastron which means the closest point of an orbiting body to its relative star. This serene, granular textures as melody simmers are lovely, before the great majesty of it’s glorious reveal. It’s a track to close your eyes an imagine the vastness of something greater than yourself, and what if anything, that says or means.

In opposition, the interlude Apastron – which is the furthest point away from a star an orbiting body can be – brings the antithesis of its predecessor; a sparse sombre tone, as if we have turned away from the great heart of a sun, and looked upon the void. The narrative deeps in No Light where BARRENS tap into a haunting droning, that leaves you feeling all the hope and warmth from before has drained away in it’s drudging. It’s haunting, degraded outro is especially captivating. This stretched, distorting tape sound gives way to Collapsar. The last two thirds of this record have had a fantastic through-line narrative that you are both informed of, and left to interpret. Collapsar, though still on the grave side, has a renewed strength and purpose, as if the very gravitational collapse the name suggests is a purposeful part of a stellar lifecycle. It’s a parallel maybe to the paths of our own lives, which all come to inevitable places in the end. It’s a gargantuan track that pulls emotionally and delivers some fantastic riffs.

Inevitably the tale of our great astrophysical journey hits on a topic of what is left after these huge altering events. Remnants is a sparse, wistful moment of solitude right at the end, an apt penultimate track. As we come to that final track, A Nothing Expands, the line “Rage, rage by the dying of the light” is called to mind. This isn’t a gentle shuffling off into the endless nothing. This is a defiant track full of life and hope and sorrow. It’s the end of the journey, but much like our universe, maybe the nothing can in fact become something so incomprehensible, filled to the brim with fire and unforgiving passion, sentience and malice. It’s a promise of things not being over, a droning prayer to the endless out there.

There’s so much lush story telling in Corpse Lights, which takes some mighty skill in an instrumental album. Expansive, sorrowful, and consistently full of awe in it’s very deepest sense, BARRENS have created something magical and otherworldly with this record.

Rating: 8/10

Corpse Lights is set for release on September 12th via Pelagic Records.

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