Ambition has long been Neurosis’ hallmark. When the Bay Area band, which started out playing crust-caked hardcore in the ’80s, turned toward longer songs and stranger textures on 1990’s The Word As Law, there was no blueprint to follow. Instead, they spent the next decade forging one barrier-obliterating album after the next. By 1999’s Time of Grace—released with an ambient companion album by Neurosis’ alter ego, Tribes of Neurot, which was meant to be played on top of Times of Grace—the group had morphed into an entity of ritualism, dark spectacle, and metaphysical sprawl. Since then, they’ve gradually whittled down their vision to a more manageable size, but even then, their prodigious albums never fell below the hour-long mark. Yet their eleventh and latest full-length—the 41-minute-long Fires Within Fires—is, by a sizable margin, their briefest album since The Word As Law came out 26 years ago.
Granted, there are more ways to gauge ambition than album length. But for Neurosis, the mystique of milestones like Souls at Zero and Enemy of the Sun went hand in hand with how far they were willing to push themselves. Neurosis’ music is meant to be immersive, a labyrinth, something to be wandered into warily and only eventually escaped from. That gravity is largely lacking in Fires. Sure, the tracks are heavy as ever, from the vein-bursting riff-mongery of “Bending Light” to the more corrosive future-psychedelia of “A Shadow Memory” and “Fire Is the End Lesson.” The last features some tried-and-true, staccato-vocal interplay between guitarists Scott Kelly and Steven Von Till, but it doesn’t add up to much more than an exercise in the familiar. “Bending Light” doesn’t even properly feature Neurosis’ main strength—the layering of instruments to an inhuman degree of atmospheric density. Instead, everyone is just kind of playing at the same time. When the inevitable soft part lurches clumsily into the inevitable hard part, the loudest sound is a checklist being checked.
Fires sags in both the beginning and the middle, but it ends, however lopsidedly, with a staggering exhibition of quiet power. “Broken Ground” and “Reach” are cut from whole cloth, concluding the album with a combined 20 minutes of hushed, chanted, circular folk-metal. That said, “Broken Ground” works so well because it sounds like one of Von Till’s solo songs that just so happens to be fleshed out by Neurosis. This is where the band’s heart seems to reside circa 2016—in a convocation of towering, cosmos-scraping arpeggios and eschatological warnings about “psychic waves” and “the end of all we’ve seen” that’s more Swans and Lungfish than the old sludge-and-doom routine. Why Neurosis hasn’t committed to this subtle, skeletal approach more fully on Fires is anyone’s guess, but the album suffers for that indecision. As good as these final two songs are, they’re not enough. At only 40 minutes total, Fires feels like it’s over just as it should be hitting its climax.
If one of the album’s weaker tracks, like “Bending Light,” were to be removed, this would be a solid, four-song EP of the same duration and scope as 2000’s respectable Sovereign. Instead, it’s neither fish nor fowl: Fires Within Fires is a piece of music that’s too skimpy to be a full-blooded Neurosis LP and too bloated to be a lean, concentrated Neurosis EP. There’s no shame in this, but at this point in their career Neurosis are being vastly outperformed by a legion of younger bands they’ve influenced, from Pallbearer to Inter Arma to Dead to a Dying World. That doesn’t in any way diminish what Neurosis has accomplished over the decades; these younger bands have yet to touch the horrific magnificence of Neurosis’ 1996 masterpiece Through Silver in Blood. But as that album celebrates its twentieth anniversary, it’s becoming clearer that these days Neurosis are fueled less by ambition and more by reiteration.
