On their 2010 album Blackjazz, the Norwegian jazz/prog collective Shining absorbed metal into their aesthetic, and it seemed to focus them. On earlier records the band, organized around multi-instrumentalist Jørgen Munkeby, were more elusive, but Blackjazz was an album made entirely of jagged shapes, like the irregular, violent architecture of a cliffside. It feels aggressively assembled, as if its ideas of metal and jazz were less harmonized than magnetized together. The follow-up, 2013’s One One One, reduced them into an atomically unstable industrial rock band. While thrilling, the album could have the remoteness of a formal exercise.
International Blackjazz Society sounds like a compression of these two approaches, but it evolves into something distinct as you listen. Unlike One One One, the songs here don’t simply accelerate until they expire. There’s more space in the arrangements, and the songs expand into the room they’re afforded. Some of this shift can be credited to new drummer Tobias Ørnes Andersen, who plays industrial music with more patience and tension than previous drummer and founding Shining member Torstein Lofthus. "Thousand Eyes" feels like stoner metal, of all things; the riff is a little more drunk than the band usually allows. "House of Warship" is free jazz, which is actually new territory for Shining; even their freest moments on previous records seemed premeditated, a kind of organized collapse. Whenever Munkeby plays saxophone on International Blackjazz Society the songs sound as if they’re sprouting fractals.
Still, even as the band relaxes into new atmospheres there’s an extreme, ascetic discipline on display. The architecture of their music is modernist, a series of inelastic and inorganic shapes colliding with the velocity of a distant level of "Tetris". On International Blackjazz Society’s final track, "Need", you can feel this refined performance begin to rupture. It’s as unhinged as it is straightforward; as it acquires mass in the choruses it seems to list off the ground into some new, uncertain gravity. For all the blur and motion of their music, this hint of deeper chaos might be the album's most exciting moment.
