ARRIVER: "Emeritus" - Dec 1, 2016

Progressive blackened death metal band ARRIVER, will release their new album Emeritus on December 1st 2016. The album is a sonic monument to the tragic anti-heroes and inexorable inanimate forces of real and re-imagined history.

Arriver stands apart from its contemporaries in Chicago's burgeoning art/metal underground in its remarkable sonic diversity, technical alacrity and unique conceptual focus, releasing what amounts to complete books in musical form. Emeritus chooses the Chernobyl event of 1986 as the inflection point of its narrative.

The band's members draw direction from over two decades' creative experience together and apart, and the aftershocks of their earlier efforts can be heard now, from Rabid Rabbit's abstract doom to the Butchershop Quartet's technical rigor, to the post-hardcore velocity of Viza-Noir.

By contrast ARRIVER's most well known predecessor is all but inaudible: MacAdam and the brothers Sullivan figured prominently in the Chicago lineup of Songs: Ohia, and all three play on Jason Molina's seminal masterpiece, Magnolia Electric Co.

Emeritus declares allegiance to and proclaims mastery of The Heavy Riff right out of the gates, and returns frequently to this anchor point. "Liquidators" presents a Zeni Geva-esque overlay of primal thud with textural spaciousness as it follows the doomed Chernobyl firefighters up the ladder; their commitment spurring them on in the face of their certain demise.

"The Demon Core" cuts away at great speed to witness the folly of human atomic carelessness in an intensely focused thrash led by the Dans' blistering guitars and Rob's larynx-shredding death metal roar. But the sudden shift mid-song to looping hypno-rock anchored in Kaplan's motorik pulse flips the table to evoke Finnish kraut-metal tricksters Circle.

This transition is a sign of things to come, as the remainder of Emeritus overlays its plutonium core with heresy after heresy, exploding the sonic palette. "True Bypass" drops the album's most doom-laden moment amid a wall of 12-string chime as it recalls, minute-by-minute, the events of April 26th 1986, while "URSa" (the shortest track at a fleeting five minutes) drives inexorably forward in Loop-like polyrhythmic throbbing repetition to set up the centerpiece "Emeritus: The Zone Of Exclusion". This 13-plus-minute epic-within-an-epic begins with a tumbling arpeggiated fugue, then suddenly strikes bottom at Emeritus' foundational, heaviest passage, an Obituary-esqe figure which is then subdivided and finally broken apart entirely. From there, the song proceeds through an episodic progression that is so aurally varied yet thematically focused as to recall Yes at their peak, resolving once again, feet planted on stage monitors, in an ecstatic and unabashedly melodic closing statement.

Where Arriver's past recordings have presented robo-hallucinatory fiction, (Vanlandingham and Zone) and footnoted historical essay, (Tsushima), all their works share the objective of discovering hope amid hopelessness; from disaster, triumph. Emeritus as a whole, and this closing track in particular, present the bands re-telling of Chernobyl as magical realism. The despoliation of the land by man's folly is animistically reimagined as the moment of rebirth; establishing in a post-human landscape “...a new Eden, awash in the glow of the sundered atom's rays.”

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Tags:  arriver, emeritus, chicago  

Sevine E. Levine    October 06, 2016