Pyramids Pyramids

Pyramids’ début album, released this year on Hydra Head, is one of the most singularly unnerving, majestic, difficult and confusing records you are likely to hear for some time. Like crawling down Dante’s concentric circles, it is noise without release, structure without form, a void without relinquishment. Although assigning genre tags in this case seems as futile a task as I have ever been set, Pyramids exist in a world where Christian Fennesz has turned evil and escalates his distorted ambience into a thundering post-rock, post-everything blitzkrieg on your senses. Formless vocals drift in and out of the mix (and are particularly striking on the opening Sleds); guitars tear at your ears; stuttering drum machines attempt to keep track of the chaos, succeeding only partially. The experience of listening to this album is what I imagine entering Conrad’s darkness must have felt like; huge, overpowering and cavernous.

This aural intensity takes its toll; while outstanding tracks like Hellmonk and The Echo of Something Lovely show us something genuinely unsettling and experimental, other tracks run the risk of redundancy as they offer nothing new to a formula which, even on its own terms, requires the new, requires constant escalation and deceleration to maintain order and interest in an aural platter without chorus, without easily identifiably melody or even rhythm at times; hence, tracks such as Ghost struggle to fully assert themselves. Pyramids demands this kind of abstraction; anything else would be inadequate to fill the torrential chasm they want to open up. By the time we reach the closing 1, 2, 3, you have been thrilled and socked into submission.

This début leaves an imprint of deep ambivalence; it sometimes feels as though the four-piece have attempted to pay lip-service to just too many ideas without giving them chance to breathe within their cacophony, and the album as a whole veers towards unlistenability at times for those weak of constitution. Despite this, Pyramids leaves its mark as an extremely remarkable and impressive début, and once heard, is unlikely to be forgotten.