NYOS – Waterfall Cave Fantasy Forever
Release Date: 27th October 2023
Label: Pelagic Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Noise Metal, Progressive, Post-Metal, Avant-Garde, Noise Rock, Math Rock.
FFO: And So I Watch You From Afar, Battles, Adebisi Shank.
Review By: Andy Spoon
As a fan of And So I Watch You From Afar, I was immediately interested in a band that attempted to encapsulate the same energy. There is an element of groove that, when combined with the technique of experimental guitar, creates a fun experience for the listener. NYOS is a project with members from Finland and the U.K. that has been active since 2012. Their second studio release, Waterfall Cave Fantasy Forever (WCFF), is set to be released on October 27th, 2023 on Pelagic Records.
The main thing that a listener is going to experience is the experimental sounds which come from the guitar and drums. The drums are exceptionally-well recorded, allowing the ghost notes and minor “tap taps” across the kit to come through while the guitars are looping and beeping in and out of time. The drum section is the part which had immediately grabbed me, as the album largely sounds like it could be a drum clinic showcase for backbeat drummers who wanted to get into prog rock. I don’t mean that in any ugly way, either. I mean, it’s a great showcase of the percussion section’s skills and discipline.
The overall “sound” and character of the entire album is a blend of ridiculousness and restraint. I think that my favorite way of interpreting the offering is to think about someone improvising a few cool guitar loops or drum riffs, but then pulling everything together in certain moments with the intent of unifying a few grooves together into a whole ingot of music. There are a half dozen little parts to a track that always seem to be drawn into a globalized sound.
The beginning of a track might have a staccato pace of 16th notes on guitar that repeat throughout the entire song, only to be built upon by a second, third, and 4th pattern, building like a Phillip Glass-y, minimalist feeling. There are meant to be layers of sound, which is expertly-done. It seemed like I knew I was going to get really tired of the incessant repetition of a single note, just like in Follow The Hawk Moth. However, I was able to tune out certain parts that were excitedly-repetitive, as the drum section was going absolutely nuts during 16+ measures of the trill. It should have worked, but it just ended up creating something that I really enjoyed.
In some ways, I really felt like these guys would be a fun element to add to a show with El Ten Eleven and Adebisi Shank. The guitars are often augmented with harmonizers, filters, and octave effects, sometimes imitating synthesizer-type notes that create percussive patterns for the drums to groove with. Honestly, though, it sounds like the guitars were taken right off of the And So I Watch You From Afar and Adebisi Shank speed dial of effect. That doesn’t make me feel poorly about anything on the album. It just makes me think that there are derivative parts of the album which couldn’t be differentiated from tracks by the aforementioned artists.
Luckily, I quite enjoy those bands, so I was willing to dive deeper into the overall message of the album as a whole. I would say, generally, the “meaning” of the album to me was that sense of building groove into the chaos of the sonic “hall of mirrors” that the patterns and loops create. It’s not music that is meant to write like a traditional “song”. It’s more like electronic music, in the sense that you are supposed to absorb it, rather than perceive its content from part-to-part. If you sit and count measures, look for new variations and layers, or hope for lyrical breaks, you will be sadly disappointed. There is an atmospheric element to the album; and I’m pretty sure that NYOS intends it to be that way.
The overall feeling I had gathered after the album was really that I had just heard some amalgam of the previously-mentioned similar acts. I wanted to justify the copy and paste style, but after enough time, I had a hard time doing it. As a metal reviewer, I’m no stranger to someone ripping off another’s entire shtick. After all, that’s how subgenres are created. Another thing to consider is the fact that Adebisi Shank hasn’t done much in recent years of note; and that And So I Watch You From Afar Underwhelmed audiences with their last release, to such a degree that I can’t name the album offhand.
For some, I wonder if they would want to hear something that sounded like an older micro-genre (robot rock) from 11 years ago, but re-written and staged again. I’m just not sure how I feel about it. As someone who loves drums, this album was absolutely amazing. I think that if I were to spin it again, it would be to absorb the percussion section alone, as it is absolutely a standout amongst all of the bands who write this style of post-post-rock. It ended up being the marquee element of the entire album. However, I feel like much of the album is going to reach out to fans of NYOS’s cohort looking for a little more of the rhythmic music “feel” of the sub-sub-subgenre. If you’re a fan of spazzy guitar loops and exceptionally-tight backbeat drumming, you might really want to check out Waterfall Cave Fantasy Forever, an album that isn’t ashamed of its roots, but adds a “groove” aspect to its corpus.
(2.5 / 5)
