The publicity for Scott Conner's new album as Xasthur shows him, probably for the first time, without black-metal corpse paint. He looks like any other regular Joe trying to look serious while wearing a hood. He isn't, though. Over the course of many albums and even more splits and EPs, Xasthur has become perhaps the biggest name in American black metal. Ironically, a cult of personality has sprung up around him because he has shunned the spotlight. He rarely gives interviews, withheld printed lyrics from his last album, and until now, has appeared only in grainy photos with face obscured by makeup. His unveiling might suggest some insight into the personality behind his sound. Instead, it brings greater obfuscation, as his music has become even more gnarled and disturbed.
In a world where "metal" isn't a dirty word, Conner could be hailed as some kind of composer genius. He's not a composer in the traditional sense; in fact, structural composition is his greatest weakness. Xasthur tracks tend to be long and droning and don't go anywhere. However, they reside in a unique place. Conner has taken the "suicidal black metal" pioneered by the likes of Shining and Silencer (who themselves were inspired by Burzum) into territories that strain metal's boundaries. Metal usually is big and strong. Xasthur is born of weakness, with tinny tones and strangled shrieks off in the distance. Songs don't involve riffs so much as miasmas of guitar. The gestures are basic-- slow jangles, mostly-- but they involve lots of "wrong" notes and indeterminate tonalities. Add broken church-organ keyboards and hyper-dramatic song titles ("Malice Hidden in Surrealism", "Funerals Drenched in Apathy"), and the results are crackpot, yet harmonically rich. Scoring Xasthur for string ensembles would befit horror movies.
Conner has perhaps realized this, as All Reflections Drained is hardly metal. Its mood is heavy, and it houses some distorted guitars. But keyboards and textures are more prevalent than ever; this record could be mistaken for Kronos Quartet on a binge of downers. Previous record Defective Epitaph was Xasthur's first with acoustic drums. Its songs weren't as endless as before, probably because Conner discovered that playing real drums was more troublesome than letting electronic ones do the work. His wobbly playing gave the record a crackly, crepitant quality. All Reflections Drained continues likewise, and feels even more "foldable," due to strange editing techniques. Songs often morph mid-stream into unrelated grooves. At their best, they echo the Charles Ives effect of multiple ensembles playing against each other. At their worst, they feel like sketches pasted together haphazardly. Conner dislikes doing vocals, and thus this record is mostly instrumental. Pianos, dime store guitars, timpanis, and strings (real or synth, it doesn't really matter) swirl together in dirty, disharmonic soups. It's a mess-- sometimes frustrating, sometimes interesting, and always utterly depressing.
