Katabatic - Heavy Water Review
rating: 2
My father always told me that a good solo needs to be able to tell a story, for the longest time in my youth I was rather confused by that concept. I didnt quite understand how a sequence of notes was supposed to tell me a story and I spent many car rides with my father pointing at the radio asking was there a story in that solo? It wasnt until I became involved with Post-Rock in the later years of high school did I finally understand how music can tell a story purely based on emotion, it wasnt the sort of story we as humans understand with a long string of words based around some three act structure but instead it was a journey using the emotional cues. Its not like there were characters or a plot but there was most definitely a journey. This is something I feel relates to almost all instrumental music. Standard music with a singer utilizes lyrics to tell a story so instrumental music must find a way to tell a story without vocalizing it. Sadly, Katabatic doesnt do the greatest job of telling a story with their release Heavy Water. Heavy Water is best described as a sludgy instrumental Metal album that lightly borrows elements from Post-Metal. The songs definitely specialize in long compositions as a nod to the Post-Rock but are written much more like a traditional Metal song in execution, its hard to verbalize how Katabatic maintains a linear style of songwriting without sounding too much like the genre without saying its really really sludgy metal. Vocals are used, albeit extremely rarely and never have much impact on the song other than being used as more of an additional instrument to throw into the mixing pot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP4W9AgKoa4 Heavy Water starts out with quite the misstep, album opener Wonder-Room is one of the weakest songs off the album and does quite a poor job of setting up the rest of the tracks. Despite being almost eight minutes long it doesnt particularly go much of anywhere with the time it spends, its broken up into a harder half and a softer half but each half of the song doesnt have any particular grace to its performance and ends up sounding more like repetition with little variety. Worse yet the transition from hard to soft isnt that great and the end of the song ends so abruptly that I thought my file was corrupted (for the record I have this album directly from the official promotional release). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsBnFVadC18&feature=relmfu The rest of the album fares better than the opening track with better overall compositions and use of instrumental aspects. The best example of this is the longest track on the album Anova which greatly utilizes all eleven minutes to set up and execute great emotional tones. This is easily the most solid execution of linear songwriting on the album with great build up and delivery while still maintaining the identity that it strives for during the rest of Heavy Water. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkOPZy7A_4M&feature=relmfu Anova has a little brother track called Abandónica that is a little over eight minutes and closes out Heavy Water on a great note. Much like Anova this showcases a great linear style of songwriting utilizing cues already established earlier in the album and has a great pay off not only at the end of the track but as a overall closer to the album itself. While Heavy Water has some good moments in it the problem is that these are sparse and cannot carry the album on their own. The tracks like Anova and Abandónica can be seen as the tracks on the album where Katabatic go okay lets stop being sludgy and go Post-Rock but that doesnt feel all that accurate in relation to how they play into the album as a whole. Yes, these two tracks sound the most like Post-Rock with their added emphasis on linear songwriting and emotional tones but they never sound like they are betraying the way the rest of the album sounds. What it sounds like instead is that these songs are just overall better executed and more effective. Heavy Water just has a hard time telling stories with its music. The pieces of the music work best as a sum of their parts because on their own they are below average. The music isnt particularly heavy and the writing doesnt fully utilize the emotional tones it needs to tell a story and make things interesting, its sludginess is really the one aspect that is keeping it above water. It has its moments but Katabatics Heavy Water definitely finds itself outclassed with this release. Katabatics website can be found here.