Review: Legends Of The Desert: Volume 4 – Eagle Twin & The Otolith
With the Legends Of The Desert series the fine people of Desert Records have set about pulling together split releases from a commendably eclectic selection of groups under a general banner of celebrating legends, reframing the idea of ‘the desert’, and ultimately building a new mythology. Without listing previous collaborators, this has so far brought us newcomers, bands who work with the Western vernacular in a particular way and legit progenitors of desert rock. However, I would say that if looking for two groups to assist with creating a new mythology then one could do far worse than Eagle Twin and The Otolith.
Both groups have a claim to speak to the desert, although here, we are talking about the empty spaces of Utah rather than the more southerly reaches that the term tends to evoke (from this side of the Atlantic anyway). Both groups bring significant pedigree to the project – Eagle Twin as doom outsiders, drawing on old indigenous myth as much as Ted Hughes and the Old Testament verse in tone-dense storytelling – and The Otolith of course as the onward-rushing creative impulse of most of heavy progressivists SubRosa.
In recording Volume 4, both bands set up at The Boar’s Nest Studio in Salt Lake City; recorded, mixed, and mastered of course by Andy Patterson who also drums for The Otolith. This proximity in working practice has not made a collaboration of the record however, this is clearly a split release, with each band drawing solidly from their own vein of ore and sounding distinctly like themselves. Furthermore, unlike some split releases, there is not a sense that they have each pitched in castaways from other albums, these are formed songs, with the sense that – whatever silence may fall between published pieces – if one were to open the door of the studio this is what these bands would be doing.
If the material is ore, then The Otolith have carried the refining process far further, resulting in some luscious American gothic violin and soaring vocals, epic and mournful. A cold beauty like winter wind through the canyons, over the plains, like a familiar folk song becoming lament. They wield heft with ease, often not far from the metallic end of post-metal but as an afterthought to the song-making.
each band drawing solidly from their own vein of ore and sounding distinctly like themselves…
Eagle Twin on the other hand are a shaggier beast, as ever deceptive in their musicality, deftness buried in deep distortion. Gentry Densley pours forth the gooiest and crunchiest of tone, like a waffle smothered in waves of melted-cheese-fudge-sauce, but nevertheless immensely classy in some ineffable way. Earthy and raw, of the body, paradoxical levitas/gravitas, grounded and lifted aloft on Tyler Smith’s sneakily jazzy drum work. From the off they set about flooding the weir with their maximal minimal animal. If The Otolith are head and heart, then Eagle Twin (horn and halo) is all guts and gristle.
Both these groups are looking forward in their music-making, but there is also a callback implicit in their works. For The Otolith, this is felt in the reaching back to an Old Country folk tradition from before the New World was ‘settled’, or indeed stolen. Eagle Twin on the other hand look to marry the land’s own stories to a musical language birthed from the violence of colonisation.
Their playful seriousness recalls the shifting feel of Melville’s writing in Moby Dick, which builds upon ‘a tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury’ (as he describes the exhortations of Stubb to his boat’s crew). Indeed, Melville writes about the desert in this tone, in a passage that one could well imagine in Densley’s distinct delivery which links the open spaces of land and sea: ‘the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in these jaws of death!’
As an epigraph to Legends Of The Desert: Volume 4 this would seem most apt.
Label: Desert Records
Eagle Twin: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
The Otolith: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Harry Holmes
