Darq e freaker cherryade1/10/2024 ![]() Admittedly for some these may be reasons they find themselves turned off by the comparative tidiness of 'Engravings', but this is hardly a work without its own eccentricities. The train-track rattle of Onward stays woven around thick bass pulsations, with the guitar picks here pearlier and less on the attack, while An Hour’s dub backdrop stays gelled around rolls of drum syncopation.Īll this comes together most clearly for the closer and potential stand-out Friend, You Will Never Learn, which blossoms out of what appears to be a backward-looped intake of breath and forms into a meditative and stirring eight minutes, and undoubtedly one of Barnes’s more accessible compositions to date. Here, and for the most part throughout, there’s a greater emphasis on connecting the disparate moods and textures around more pronounced rhythm and beat. The guitar caresses and the dampened voices (often Barnes’ own) of 'Dagger Paths' are again present, but the often entangled, amorphous styling has given over to something more concrete. ![]() This is mostly testament to how much Forest Swords is an artist who exists entirely within his own boundaries, not much interested in looking too far out, but it’s the fortification of the very building blocks of this singular sound that makes 'Engravings' such a bewitching follow-up to Barnes's debut.įrom the smooth mandolin vibrato of Ljoss onwards, this fortification is present right from the start. But for a work so highly praised, while the stark appreciation and application of space can be felt in recent work from Tri Angle artists such as The Haxan Cloak (where Forest Swords is now also settled), it’s debatable how significant its influence has been over the UK underground since. It was that relatively rare of things: an inaugural release that came built around elements that appeared genuinely fresh in their assembly. Aura-like and expansive, it carried a punk edge through its meandering guitars that clanged like sheets of corrugated metal and its alien, almost uneasy proximity to dub. ![]() Listening back to ‘Dagger Paths’, the debut release from northern producer Forest Swords, if anything it’s getting easier to identify why it garnered such loving praise.
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