Review Summary: Marsen Jules' perfect ear for aural manipulation is not enough to help this listless, superficial rendering of the cold Nordic landscape.
Marsen Jules' body of work is like that of a knife; on one side there is a piercing edge, while the other is a cool dullness. At his most ambitious, Jules offers ambience with sharpness. Last year's
Beautyfear was a dark emblem of this, existing as an eerie and affecting sample of the artist's particular brand of ambient music. Yet in cases such as
The Empire of Silence, he offers up quite the opposite.
On this latest record, Jules portrays the nordic landscape in all its cold beauty and exiguous spaces. He utilizes stringed instruments and collapses them down into their bare essence with great efficacy. It's lush, sparse, and all together lovely. Soundscapes swell to great proportions only to whither into snowy sounds. In this sense
The Empire of Silence is a great success. Jules refracts time and sound into a singular form, begging the listener to question if the noises heard are moving abruptly or scarcely at all. His skill is not in question. Jules has a pitch perfect ear for crafting beautiful and lucid sounds. However, here there is no edge; no sharp hook to reel the listener into this cold and ethereal landscape. The swells and wanes are lovely and listless in their approach but the effectiveness is not there. The nordic landscape is seeping through each note, but only superficially. It's as if Jules presented a postcard of the snowy tundra but without the sharp, biting cold. Without the brilliance of the elements,
The Empire of Silence is nothing more than a pretty picture.
That being said it is, for all intents and purposes, very pretty. The niceties should not be completely thrown away considering that Marsen Jules really does have quite a gift for aural manipulation. It's simply too bad that this could not translate into a more arresting experience. Everything from the phoned in title to the stock cover art is by the numbers ambient. It is not quite enough to be merely "pretty," especially considering that the artist is capable of so much more.
