The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
-CG Jung
Dear readers of this review of Alluvion by Mizmor and Hell
Alluvion
I am reluctant, beyond description, to write these words. I will write honestly, as I have done time and time again with you: I am a wreck of nerves to write about the collaboration between Mizmor and Hell called Alluvion.
If any of you reading this know me at all, you will know that Mizmor and Hell are two of my favorite “bands,” artists that defy categorization, artists that define me as a musician, and artists that have helped form the way I think about music. Their seemingly disparate yet inevitably conjoined paths have been the compass, the lodestone from which my musical journey has been based for almost a decade. I am an unabashed admirer of their work, and a collaboration between Mizmor and Hell is, for me, something like a dream and a nightmare simultaneously come true.
I have listened to this album more times than I can count. It defies words, and that is the struggle, isn’t it? How do you talk about something so personal, so extremely personal, without cracking up and ending up like Jack Nicholson at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, lobotomized and drooling? The answer is: you go to the source of your affection for a piece of art.
depression and anxiety…some of those grooves get worn pretty deep.
-ALN
It is important that I briefly digress, as it will show why I consider Alluvion to be not only the sole contender for album of the year (I know, it’s April – whatever) but one of the contenders for album of the decade, if not the century, that we have lived so far.
Hyperbole has always been my strong suit but I don’t speak in a hyperbolic manner when I say these things – I speak as a person who has been changed by an album, as an individual, as a fan, as someone who has seen hell itself in concrete terms and lived to tell the tale.
It reminds me of the first time I went to the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Everyone around me was silent, in awe, inspired, perhaps lost in the pathos of the moment. And I felt nothing. I saw splotches of gradient color, nothing more. Maybe I’m an ignorant ass, but that’s what I saw and what I felt. I wanted to understand how these people could be so overawed by a work of art that it drove them not to speak about it, but to delve into the depths of absolute silence.
Then I heard Alluvion.
I want to tell you about every song, about every movement. I want to write a fucking full-length book about this album, because there is so much here to delve into, to explore, to admire and to love and to hate from a place of jealousy.
I want to wish upon a star that there was more to this album than four songs. I want to tell you about how ALN and MSW have created a metaphysical masterpiece told through two guitars, a bass, a drum kit, and their voices. I want to tell you that each song is masterfully crafted, masterfully perfected through solemn consideration. But all I can tell you is that I am forever changed by an album.
When I first heard Alluvion, friends, I was in the midst of a stress-induced panic attack. I am prone to these, especially when my stress gets to an extreme level as I so often let it. In the midst of this, in a moment of semi-delirious clarity, I remembered something in the PR packet about how the album was about relief for psychic distress. I grabbed my phone, connected it to my receiver, and played this album as loud as I could.
That was when the panic attack eased, eased, eased, and suddenly…dissipated entirely. Stress and self-hatred and fear turned into calm, a tenuous calm that would eventually give way to more stress. As ALN told me in a recent interview, “depression and anxiety…some of those grooves get worn pretty deep.”
My grooves are worn deeper than the grooves in the vinyl I spin on my turntable. They’re worn deeper than the wrinkles of an old man contemplating his impending mortality. They are the bog of trauma that ALN mentioned to me that he considered when working on this album. But they are also the grooves and the bog that I look forward to escaping when the panic or depression ceases. Alluvion, for me and hopefully for many of you, is not a cure but is most assuredly a salve from which the aching, itching, festering wound of mental illness finds relief.
What ALN and MSW have done here is to create a perfect melding of the mind, something that is eased by their long familiarity with each other as friends, as musical compatriots, as collaborators on the stage. They have given us – in my case, at least, the depressed, the anxious, the manic – a potion from which all of those struggles seem to cease for a brief time. They have combined their souls into immortality, an immortality from which there is no release – they are here to stay as members of a pantheon. They have changed lives and continue to do so.
As a more formal note, I must say this is one of the best-sounding albums I’ve heard in a long time. The mixing and mastering are done perfectly. Each note is placed perfectly, precisely in its right place. The ebb and flow is that of the Nile meandering its way across a continent, content to be in its place and carry you along with its waves. The guitars are perfectly sculpted, the bass is bludgeoning, and the drums carry the sound along as they should. The vocals are haunting, sad, and full of grief.
But this album is more than its technical components. It is a love letter of grief. ALN recently said, when I spoke with him, “As you go through life, you’re culling experience and eventually it will well up and create inspiration…catharsis.” Catharsis is the heart of this album. It is the life’s blood that flows through the veins of the songs, that forms the grooves upon the vinyl. It is the pick upon the strings, the stick against the snare, the laceration of the vocal cords as they rebel against extreme sounds and techniques. It is the sensation of listening to a release of negative mental energy.
Gratitude
Dear readers, I am grateful for this album.
Grateful for its existence. Grateful for its impact upon me. Grateful for the fact that Gilead Media decided to release it before shuttering. Grateful to ALN and MSW for collaborating in a more formal manner. Grateful to myself for having the tenacity to fight through mental anguish so that I could live in this very moment, writing about this album. Grateful to whatever is out there, whether it be a god or gods or physics or happenstance that have led me to where I could hear something that instilled in me such a feeling of peace that I can walk forward, changed and eternal in the belief that I have seen the mountaintop. And it is Alluvion.
Its name is Alluvion.
Sincerely,
Blake
Clean and Sober Stoner
