This is a band that exists to explore the intricacies of the human mind and is concerned with our relationship with the natural world. You’re probably conjuring up all kinds of swirling noises, maybe even a chaotic wall of harshness that ebbs and flows with the poetic ease of a river winding its way over the planet's eroded terrain. Maybe you're also envisioning in your mind's eye a group of cloak-clad mystics wailing like a distorted choir into the black vastness of night. Yes, that’s right, I’m glad we’re on the same page, it’s all very mysterious and yet not unexpected. I can assure you this isn’t meant as a reductive view of Den Der Hale’s stylistic and musical approach. I'm merely setting the scene and it’s one that most people seeking out these sounds will already know and to a great extent one they love.
Pastoral Light doesn’t do anything unexpected in its 45-minute runtime either. Long atmospheric passages of mood-inducing spoken words, chants and whispers overlaying droned riffs segue into more than a few moments of explosive thrashing and cacophony, before settling back again. The Swedish five piece drifts across sonic genres like kraut and post-rock and shifts between taking conspiratorial and berating tones. It’s enough to remain interesting but it’s not all fun, and arguably it’s not really meant to be, but a sense of poe-faced seriousness isn’t exactly welcome either.
The sedately paced march of “Horse From Turin” sounds like an elongated jam that threatens to erupt but never fully launches, despite the splashing drumming as it ends, it’s held together within fairly restrained crunching guitar riffs while Pontus Lindskogen (guitar, vocals) and Mimosa Baker (synth, vocals) equally share ethereal vocal duties. For a song initially inspired by a film, Bella Tarr’s “The Turin Horse”, that itself is based on a rumour regarding the whipping of a horse said to have caused the mental breakdown of Friedrich Nietzsche it’s a relatively tame beast.
Epic centrepiece inclusion “Old Blood” however is exactly the sort of myth-making, grinding and ferocious type of tone poem mixed with primordial soup you would hope for following the more gently atmospheric opening of the album. Densely layered bedrock is piled and pummelled into place only to have the latter part of the song break it apart with awesome chiselled bass, drumming from the bowels of the earth and grittily twitching collisions. Here Axel Nelson (drums), Ejner Trenter (bass) and Max Bredberg (guitar) take their own not insignificant contributions to another level entirely and focus the mass of a billion suns - I exaggerate for effect - into a truly pummelling fusion of post-psych bravado and atonal thunder. Melodies throughout are filtered through heavy effects, lingering in percussive echoes for aeons.
The breathy fresh air once again settles and both “Point Of No Recourse” and ”Halvmesyr” allow some respite from the intensity of crushing noise but then the album's closer, and standout song, “Donkey Skin” claws back that sense of pain, injustice and proclamation for the soul of the planet. Parker sweetly sings over the waltz-like patterns of bleary guitar and synths that devolve into lost-sounding whirs and dust in the wind, the bombast is gone but a memory of hurt remains. Other tracks have long petered out into the void now barely registering on the radar except for small musical motifs with half-lives decaying like pulsars.
Den Der Hale certainly are an intriguing quintet and with Pastoral Light they manage to form an evocative, cinematic album attempting to create sounds in unique ways that also holds the listener's attention. There’s a lot of contrasting light and shade on display but also lots of grey muddying the waters in between. It’s a broad apology to nature and a rebuke to mankind. Lamentation on the grave state of things, seeking to inspire reflection and also a way to provoke change, which is a lofty ambition for any album but always one that’s inevitably destined to fall short of such an unattainable mark.
