ALBUM REVIEW: The Collapse – Witnesses
Music is a marvellous, moving, evocative beast. Whether it emotionally stirs something deep within you, or goes so strongly against your preferred tastes it causes a reaction, music will always make a listener feel a certain way. Enter WITNESSES, a monumentally prolific machine. In just five years, they’ve released six albums, an EP and four singles. Exploring diverse genres from cinematic ambient and pop, to dark folk and doom metal, it’s an impressive spread. What makes it even more impressive is that WITNESSES is just one man: multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Greg Schwan.
Posed as a “doom-rock gem”, The Collapse explores musical territories closer to that of black metal than doom. With Schwan running point on principle writing, and the arrangement of the guitar, bass, keys, drum programming, mixing and mastering (vocals, guitar solos, piano and EBow are provided by a throng of session musicians), there is no denying that we are dealing with an incredibly talented individual.
Following the surging, atmospheric album opener Entrance, the album kicks off in earnest with title track. Blasting to life with dirgey chords and rolling-thunder drums, it certainly piques one’s interest, but then something strange happens. It may be the impeccably clean vocals battling at odds with the instrumentation; it could be the guitar runs that feel as if they are about to fall out of time on the next repetition; it might be the fact that for the first five-and-a-half minutes, this track never switches gears even slightly. Whatever it is, something feels off – hollow, even.
There’s something to be said for the value of a band with members, plural. With WITNESSES being a one man band and the vast majority of elements being played separately to be layered in production, The Collapse falls victim to getting locked into a single idea. They say that two heads are better than one, and it feels as though this record could have benefitted from wider input on certain aspects.
Trying to break this impression is Repose, which is peculiarly split into four distinct sections. Starting and ending with ambient fragments, broken apart by a melting pot of metal characteristics that kicks into overdrive at the midway point, this amalgam of ideas feels haphazardly thrown together with no smooth transitions to be found between each part.
They Giveth And Taketh Away is an almost-11 minute epic that feels like a song made to be long. The crawling opening is glacial to a fault, and when it finally evolves, it’s a sharp turn straight into a blackened-metal-by-numbers riff. Session vocalist Anlaik sounds particularly James Hetfield-esque here, but without quite as much grit, and as the song surges to something of a head, the delivery sounds strained at the higher end.
Finally, with It Will Come For You, It Comes For Everyone, the album comes to a meandering close. As it opts for a low and slow fade to silence for the fourth time in just six tracks, there is almost a sense of shock that The Collapse has reached its conclusion. Music can be a marvellous, evocative beast. So when it stirs nothing inside a listener – no physical reaction, no emotion, nothing – well that’s the most jarring thing of all.
Rating: 5/10
The Collapse is out now via self-release.
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