review by: Joshua

Good lordy. Prepare to have your tiny world crushed, splintered, flattened, pulverized, and reduced down to its most minute molecular structures before utter and complete vaporization and obliteration. And that’s the just the more genteel aspects of this album. Seriously, Minsk will fuck you up, but good.

What begins as total Neurosis worship quickly turns into something that operates on a much grander scale. The Minsk crew takes that band’s seminal piece of work, Enemy of the Sun, and utilizes it as their starting point, taking those dense tribal atmospherics and rendering them, contradictorily, more expansive and claustrophobic, thicker and lighter, single minded and open to changes. Their instincts prove keen as there’s not a misstep to be found.

Paramount is the sound. Clear, loud and unyielding in its mission to dismantle anything in its path. Sonically, Out of a Center Which is Neither Dead Nor Alive is one of the most abjectly violent albums to come down the pike in quite some time: relentless, focused and intent – an album where the quieter passages deliver an indelible bruising.

The bedrock, of course, is the huge, plodding riff, trudging along determinedly like an implacable army slashing and burning, whose scorched earth policy leaves behind nothing useful except for that which they can carry with them. Knowing that this tactic would quickly grow tiresome, Minsk folds in plenty of forays that seem delicate, and they may even be so, but really serve to accentuate the pervasive ferocity.

Lulling intros beckon the inevitable stomp of a track’s primary rhythm(s). Spacey sounding and machine-shop electronics add menace or distraction. Clean, arching vocal lines, black metal tinged choral bridges and epic, near-Viking flavored vocals juxtapose themselves against the apocalyptic shouting that generally guides the proceedings. Psychedelic tinged swaths of acoustic guitars and spare piano reveal a distinct prog fetish lurking underneath the rumble and shake of kettle drums and heavily flanged guitar. Post rock dynamics squirm their way into the mix and co-exist fitfully with the insistent churn of percussion and behemoth weight of the riffs that lay on top.

What’s so enticing about an album like this is the predictability of its unpredictability. Sure, it crushes, kills and destroys seemingly ad infinitum; that’s the given. The respites, no matter the length or when they appear, are temporary; you know this, but it’s the anticipation that’s so exhilarating, tension that’s either relieved or exacerbated with the next bout of brutality.

Out of a Center… is one of the few albums that benefits from a listening from start to finish. There are no breaks between the album’s six tracks. Each fades into the next, singular parts of an hour long journey bound together by a common goal: a dutiful march towards the abyss. (9/10)