Seattle’s darkgazer Nostalgist releases the new Disaffection album March 19 on vinyl and digitally on March 30 via the band’s own Nostalgium Directive record label. An impressive and a striking record that came in handy just a few days ago. Totally unique in his style, Asa Eisenhardt recorded a thrilling new 6-track album in the same noir atmosphere of its predecessor Of Loves and Days Ago LP (2015). We talk about edgy post-punk music filled with plenty shoegaze hints and attracted by an undisputed post-rock breeze-a record that concerns all shades of tribes from new wave…to metal!
The album, of course, is not a “medley” or a dedication to noir-rock release, but an enormously inspired work which holds brand new and prototype musings in its channels. Recorded and mixed throughout 2016 and 2017, every track in the LP features great contributions by renowned drummer Aesop Dekker (ex-Agalloch and many more). More recently, in the fall of 2017, Alex Entrekin joined as the new drummer, building on Dekker’s crushing performances while bringing nuances and twists all his own. Monte McCleery (also of Seattle funeral doom outfit Un) is currently filling in on bass. Disaffection sounds quite romantic in its melodies and so raw in its rest guitar-crafts, while the drummer performs with sober accuracy and a precise imagination throughout the whole crochet. The arrangements of the LP are monumental, meaning that Eisenhardt shows his great potentials in each song, swinging nicely from the new wave simplicities to the shoegaze busy hum, building on riffs to bridges and choruses to leads 6 songs of unrivaled grey beauty! The whole outcome sounds like being in a sort of isolated and furthermore emotional space, a ghost which is also provided by his singing technique that balances from throatal to chanting vocals. His talents in post-punk song-writing are illuminated in the darkest moments with the warm, glowing embers of nebulous shoegaze.
Once the LP is out you won’t believe its striking impact on your soul with only the surprising opener Pendulums that I had all the time to listen to it again, but no, I repeated it at once, a stunning airy post-punk gem. Or the following, the infected heaviness of shoegaze in Smoldering Amber, and the Petrichorale with its deep isolation on everything and the beautiful melody on guitar! What a surprise when I realized that Textures is a fantastic cover to Catherine Wheel‘s song from their debut icon Ferment LP, a great work here by Nostalgist, and just a little after when Threshed At Dusk, Winnowed At Dawn left me dazed with its new-wavy bitter tenderness. I kept for the last Present: Tense, the leading song from Disaffection LP and the first one that saw the light before March 30, where you may check and enjoy almost all of Nostalgist‘s revelations; tempo, melodies, groove, atmosphere, and performance, here it is!
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Written by Loud Cities Mike
