There are two ways to approach this particular album. You can simply listen to it for the music or you can go in on a deeper level and explore the narrative and in a way biography of the muse behind it. This particular muse and the catastrophist of said martyrdom is Immanuel Velikovsky. Wiki is thankfully on hand to give some background info and I learn that he was a controversial scholar whose books reinterpreted the events of ancient history. It’s interesting stuff and I will leave a link at the bottom of the review to indulge you further if you so wish. The CD actually comes with a lovely booklet with the lyrics and the album is also spurred on by narrative lecture excerpts from Velikovsky himself. I should also mention that there are some gorgeous line illustrations within the booklet putting the music, lyrics and tale into picture form. It’s obvious that a lot of care and love have gone into this.
The band themselves have been likened to many another act and not metal ones I hasten to add. This is musically going to appeal to lovers of post rock, post punk, Indie, shoegaze and Gothic. The biog mentions The Cure (who vocally I can certainly agree with) Isis and Killing Joke, the latter I am not in the slightest of agreement with. Hailing from Boston, the group only have a couple of EP’s behind them and this project is actually their debut album.
Musically this is nowhere near as complex as the subject matter suggests. The narrative voice is calming and gentle and it feels like listening to an old learned scholar which in effect you are. The music glistens in, radiant and lush and the vocals instantly hit the spot. I was on first listen instantly reminded of Solstafir who are obviously a trip back in time to past masters of the 80s themselves. The first track is ‘Birth Rites By Torchlight’ and the gorgeous illustration in the booklet is one I could look at for ages. I assume this focuses on the birth of Velikovsky himself in a graveyard shack and from hereon in we follow him through life. One of his treatises was called Stargazers and Gravediggers and as far as I am concerned that would be the perfect description to give to the music itself, it is dreamy, promises forbidden knowledge from the stars and is at times as dark as the grave. There is a hypnotic flow to the music and it really is in the tradition of bands from both the 4AD back catalogue and The Cure who have to be the biggest reference point in essence. I do like the way the vocalist adds some powerful wailing ‘whoas’ to his delivery and these at times give the music a real stadium feel.
It’s not the sort of album that warrants a track by track dissection, I have pretty much told you all you need to know and to go deeper may spoil things, the rest is up to you to go and discover yourself. Junius are obviously a very interesting band who have gone and crafted a work of passion here and everything about it reeks of class. This is a real bygone kiss in the dreamhouse.
http://www.myspace.com/junius
http://www.mylenesheath.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky
