Music has been interpreted as much more than just art for years: as a form of escapism, a backdrop to the everyday, and in 2011 the idea of transcendence was imbued in the concept of an album for perhaps the first time since Glenn Branca's The Ascension. Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, frontman of Baltimore black metal eccentrics Liturgy, wrote a manifesto expounding the concept of 'transcendental black metal', its distance from other styles of metal, and the themes that separate it from its hyperborean antithesis. Renihilation and Aesthethica brought forth its ideals not only in guitarists Hendrix and Bernard Gann's torrential, blistering harmony, but also in Greg Fox's divine drumming.
Fox upholds this tact in Guardian Alien, a quintet he founded when in Liturgy and continues to perform with having left them. Rather than being locked into Liturgy's ever-alternating time signatures, he assists amorphous drones with free-flowing percussion, from burst-beat gusts to tribal tom-roll panorama. Fox not only leads the band toward ecstatic summits, but he also lets them drop to a foreboding rattle to underscore just how colossal their trips toward ascension are, making for dynamics hard to trace even with attempted studying. The only potential hindrance of last year's self-titled effort is its sonic inhibitions, which suppressed the band's farthest-reaching crescendos at the hand of overdriven crackle.
With their followup See the World Given to a One Love Entity, Guardian Alien have eliminated any fidelity-planted deterrence that may have stood in their path. Every facet of the band's tonal expanse has been fully expressed by mastering engineer Heba Kadry (whose most prestigious endeavors include new full-lengths from Lotus Plaza and The Mars Volta). At this point, they've managed to stretch beyond the electronic yet equally psychedelic achievements of Fox's moniker GDFX and metamorphose into an essence all their own.
Along a sprawling 37-minute voyage, Guardian Alien strive for even higher planes and settle into barer abeyance on Entity. Lost in a pummeling spate, the mutated crunch of Gann's sputtering scales leans against Fox's blast-beats which, in theory, suggests vexation, but is mind-numbing in execution. They unbind and encircle Alex Drewchin's voice rapt with harmony. On shahi baaja-- a widely used electric Indian zither that is played with typewriter keys-- Turner Williams Jr. rapidly strums a Bb drone in unison with Drewchin's synth. The quintet widen their scope further to a sepulchral hum and the vastness of outdoor life and swell with the cosmic magnitude steered by the album's title. With Entity, Guardian Alien manifest transcendence by erasing boundaries and embracing absolute psychedelia.
[Guardian Alien Website]
[Buy See the World Given to a One Love Entity from Thrill Jockey Records]
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