"Our mission at the Alliance for the Great Lakes is to conserve and restore the world's largest freshwater resource using policy, education and local efforts, ensuring a healthy Great Lakes and clean water for generations of people and wildlife."
Atmospheric nature black / doom / ambient metal from USA. This is a recording worth hearing in its entirety without regard for individual tracks: it's a gorgeous work of atmosphere, acoustic folk and thrilling BM riffs and melodies.
Since forming way back in 2011, the solo nature-themed ambient BM project Crown of Asteria has logged up an impressive discography with no fewer than 6 releases including two albums in the year 2015 alone. People can say what they like about BM but they can't say some BM musicians are not hard workers. "Great Freshwater Seas" is one of those two albums mentioned ("Return to Light" being the other) and is an ambitious departure into atmospheric soundtrack territory, playing continuously for just over an hour with no track breaks.
Attempts to create a long continuous and mostly instrumental work that fully absorb listeners and engage their senses and imaginations aren't as common in atmospheric BM as they could be, and such experiments do come with plenty of pitfalls – but to be honest, I wasn't all that surprised that CoA's Meghan Wood should have had a go. Maybe part of my subconscious brain always was aware she'd try something like this. As might be expected, the album begins slowly with a mix of field recordings of waves and bird calls, acoustic guitar melodies and a cold grey cloudy ambience, all necessary to ease you into the watery soundscapes. The business end of CoA comes a lot sooner than I thought it would and it's very harsh, strident and ferocious, with guitar textures so raw and noisy that your ears might be in danger of bleeding. Vocals tend to get lost in the acid froth of the guitars but you get the impression of constantly breaking waves and churning seas. High-pitched siren guitar tones keen away continuously; depending on your mood, they can sound either really hellish or, with that slight reverb, a bit spiritual and even heavenly in parts.
Admittedly there's not much in the way of defined riffs or melodies and the music tends to be vague in its forms, the noisy raw textures erasing anything that threatens to look familiar or representative of anything we know. For the first 30 minutes, the album is very repetitive and most variations are in the details of the music. A change comes with the guitars falling away and the synth drumming taking over. I've usually found the percussion to be the weakest element in CoA's music and on this recording it still hasn't improved very much but for once the underpowered beats are a blessing: they add some variation to the music, though they overstay their welcome, and at least they don't drown out the more formless ambient cloud forms drifting by. In my opinion, the percussion could have dropped out sooner and just allowed the cloudy forms to drift along a bit as after a few minutes it becomes a bit tiresome. The guitars soon come roaring back in a raw, almost violent onslaught and rage in one solid block of fiery noise distortion. In the final movement of the track, a long extended fog of dark crumbling drone ambience drifts by and settles in, against which fragments of guitar or keyboard float.
The whole work hangs together well and rarely loses focus which can be a problem with such long soundscape pieces. Parts of it could have been edited for length and the whole recording shortened without affecting its integrity much. The second movement, dominated by the drumming, does drag on a bit too long and there is something about the percussion that is flat and boring, and needs more originality. Something like a tabla drum or an Inuit-style frame drum might have worked better than synth drums. On its own, the track's final movement is not too bad but as part of a long piece it should either resolve the tensions brought up by earlier movements and bring them to some sort of closure, or bring listeners back to bad old reality, and the ambient section does neither.
The lyrics are very important and it seems a pity that they are not upfront in the mix; if listeners aren't aware there are supposed to be voices, they would miss them entirely.
Even so, for all it could have done or didn't do, this is a brave and adventurous work that CoA could return to and refine in the future.
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