Review Summary: The Haunting In Autumn is an album you won't love, but you will certainly 'like.' In this case it's just fine
If all those who can make music make music will the world be a beautiful place? Call me a cryptic, but I don’t think so - at least, not until I heard For Another’s album The Haunting In Autumn. It’s haunting
me alright, with the thought that not enough people are getting out there and making amazing music like this. Even the most emaciated artistic bedroom poltergeists can be welly entertainment if this creator is unashamed to toss them off with a little gusto. This an album for our time: “Holy Man, Murdering Man” is the kind of opener that immediately shows you that it means business, starting with with ascending and descending graceful violins like Lethe by Kayo Dot, but then it makes dorky synthesiser cellos riff like metal guitars like Musk Ox, before incorporating real metal guitars to play power chords in 4/4 time, just like Nine Inch Nails. In this sharky neighbourhood we are fishing with dynamite.
From the some of these influences already you can see that you are in for an influential ride. The song is also epic, but not as much as “The Goku Has To Use The Spirit Bomb Because He Tried To Save The Bad Guy Experience”. That song is more epic because it is longer and has a triumphant section with distorted bass slowly crushing while the singer speaks in tongues and the guitar interjaculates with classic shred. I had no idea that something so slow could be this heavy. It is striking to hear such unabashful MIDI instrumentation set to such dedicated ends; focused songwriting transcends considerations of reality and musicianship and, after a certain point, the tones fade into the background and there is only music. When the song ends it hits you just like a freight train.
These two songs along have the weight of a modern classic but alas Atlas does not rest. There are other highlights. “In The Dark Part 1” is a song so good that its Part 2 sounds like an Ulcertate S-side, for instance. There is also “The Castle Falls”: Tweez-era Slint with strange guitar microtones and authentic screaming. This is a song that will sort the wheat from the goats, and For Another is very good at the genre so it works. Finally, there is another noise rock magnum-opus: “Hazetown”. This is the long-awaited boof passed between Daughters’ tryhard cumstain and Melt-Banana’s death helium; it is an enormous chokehold flooding your lungs with lightning laughter itchier than your favourite words or appetite resolution. A step for belief without trust. What about the other songs? I wish I could compare “Tunnels (Clean)” to a band, but I have never heard that song before.
The album’s ambitions are huge but not all of its ideas are maximum go. “The Haunting: Main Theme” is actually very quiet - there is not much going on, but it is still a memorable soundscape (all credit to the production on this song for making it sound scary). This instrumental ambience is just a tease - many wild tracks later, the title-track “The Haunting In Autumn” eventually circles back to reprise it with vocals. I believe that it should have just been a tease: this abrupt show of continuity makes me question whether the album has really laid roots in the meantime, despite having gone literally
everywhere to the full extent of its powers; maybe it is too little too late?
Closer “Cinders777” is quick to leave this heart flutter in the past, flexing classical, breakbeat and heavy rock together in a spirit banger of finale. It sits rather stably amidst all that genre incest, potentially the most focused composition of the lot - there are jokes to be had here, but the artistic impulses and craftful fingers behind all this are not themselves the butt. Is this enough to tie all those loose ends together? Maybe not, but it does make their intrigue sparkle fresher than ever. The artist is at ease inflicting this much disjuncture - on such tracks like this where his momentum is steady and melodies gleeful, his enthusiasm is a bulldozer through the arena traps of continuity gaps, alien digitalisation and production polish. Sometimes all it takes is a human heart and the slapdash heights of ***ing absurdity can scan as the good reality. If For Another’s album is a pond, then each new song is like a stone that sends ripples through its surface to ensure that their craft never stagnates. A good day for music.
