During my evening commute, I witnessed the following: masked pedestrians crossing the street, their children clutching onto them looking equal parts confused and terrified; a man with a cardboard sign reading “laid off: need money to feed my family”; a woman, in scrubs, with a thousand-yard-stare as she slowly lowers into her car for what is probably an overnight shift. Everything is gray – the sky, the clouds, the buildings – and a warm, misty drizzle patters against my windshield. There’s a very eerie calm in the air, the likes of which you witness in movies before all hell breaks loose. From my stereo,
V: Together hums like an apparition haunting the very moment. Everything is in a state of perfect, horrible equilibrium. A sense of dread washes over me immediately.
I feel an urge to chronicle this mundane yet vivid moment – partially because it is
the ideal distillation of
V: Together’s atmosphere, but especially because it represents the point of intersection between the musical realm and our current reality. If fifteen years from now my son is working on a homework assignment and asks me to recall the COVID-19 pandemic, all I’ll need to do is play this album and it will all come rushing back to me in the worst way. The look of fear in the eyes of strangers, the panic, the terrifying
quiet that somehow is more deafening than the city streets ever were at their most vibrant. It’s not a memory I cherish, but it’s ingrained in my mind forever – these apocalyptic images that represent the world at its most frightening. For whatever reason,
V: Together brings it all to life like no other album could. It’s as if Sigur Ros’
( ) collided with Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s
F#A#∞ to create something equally beautiful and terrifying.
The record’s seamless cohesion allows it to glide between ominous soundscapes and delicate reprieves without you even realizing that the ground is shifting beneath your feet. It’s unsettling how you can find yourself in a state of serenity, spacing out to a series of breathtaking classical piano notes, only to realize that a wall of menacing feedback has been slowly and subtly mounting an offensive the entire time. Usually by the time you realize it, it’s too late –
V: Together lulls you into a false sense of security only to disturb you to your core at nearly every possible turn. Monk chants, organs, and digital feedback all find their way to the foreground eventually – typically making the hairs on the back of your neck stand straight when they do. There are precious few crescendos, but the payoff is immense when Reznor finally permits
V: Together to release its long-pent-up energy.
Plenty of artists will release pandemic-themed albums over the course of 2020, but none of them will capture what it was actually like to live during this moment quite like
V: Together does. Submerged in ambience, it’s an instrumental piece that relies on emotional provocation and succeeds entirely. It’s more organic than its twin counterpart
VI: Locusts, and more contextually relevant. Viruses slither on surfaces and float imperceptibly through the air; they’re silent, pale white killers. From illness to fear, these are things that can’t be seen but can be
felt quite readily, as if they’re whispering into our ear. That’s exactly what
V: Together does with all of its smooth, unnerving progressions – it crafts an atmosphere of quiet terror that also just happens to be a flawless sonic extraction of this very moment in history.
