ALBUM REVIEW: Waning Hymns – Geist & the Sacred Ensemble

GEIST & THE SACRED ENSEMBLE have released Waning Hymns, a monolithic and shamanic observation of 21st century life. But, whilst this band clearly have big ideas and concepts at the core of their mission statements, their overall sound and lyrics are ultimately lacking. 

This album starts off with promise – a very unsettling onslaught of drones and atmosphere. However, Advaita, the first track, instantly reveals the weakness of Sauder’s vocals, frequently off-key and otherwise audibly struggling with the bigger jumps in range. 

The songs on this record are all six minutes and over, and it’s not a time stamp that they have earned. Yes, there is atmosphere created, purely by virtue of there being about seven million things going on at any one time, but none of these elements are ever expanded on or evolved into something resembling an interesting use of the exotic and unusual instruments that this band does have at its disposal. 

Another side product of this wall of sound approach is that the mix itself struggles to balance out the layers of drones, different types of bass, a range of guitars, piano, gongs and timpanis and… clarinet? The sound is sadly flat, and the creativity of this group seems to have stopped somewhere shortly after they brought as many instruments as they had knocking about their parents’ houses to the first band practice.

Closed Eye is a little more experimental and interesting, but is sadly billed as a sort of interlude, three minutes shorter than the next shortest song on the album. It mixes interesting and unsettling elements of avant-garde jazz and chromatic tones but is not given the room to develop or evolve during the album’s run time. 

Century of the Self shows some more signs of development, at least slightly more than the other tracks on the record. But, again, vocals and lyrics let this track down in a bad way. The themes of ‘technology is bad’, ‘modern life is the worst’ and ‘wake up sheeple’ are far from hot takes, and they are not explored in an interesting way. Least of all on this track, which features a shamanic-like sermon interlude (ironically, the only time on the album where Sauder’s vocals sound strong). There’s just no excuse for repeating the lyrics “you are not a number, no/we have the power to break the mould” unless you’re taking the piss out of yourself.

There are undoubtedly some interesting ideas here, in the instrumentation if not the lyrics, but nothing that is ever picked up and run with, in a satisfying way. The lyrics are just impossible to overlook, however. There are times during this record where the only sane response is to laugh at how seriously GEIST & THE SACRED ENSEMBLE takes itself, which is almost definitely not the reaction these guys were after. 

Rating: 4/10

Waning Hymns is set for release on July 31st via Scry Recordings.

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