Before we wade into the chemistry, I have a bone to pick. Declaring a musician or a group “uncategorizable” — into any one genre, scene, movement, whatever — is not a recommendation in and of itself, and certainly never the end of the discussion. It’s the beginning of the discussion, especially for a label like Staubgold. Once you scroll past that capsule hierarchy, the rating, and the (admittedly helpful) genre/RIYL orientation, we, the reviewers, use at least a few more words to say, “but, no, that really doesn’t get to it at all.” This is especially true if we like something. “Uncategorizable,” on its own, does not speak to the distance from or gravitational pull of those cultures of which it’s apparently ‘free.’ Mash-up, alien, or oblivion? Collapses across time or space? (Here’s a stickler: ignores, appropriates, and/or silences?) These get you questioning the necessary and sufficient criteria of the categories themselves. Should I brand this particularly brilliant Berlin-by-way-of-Austria quartet “Americana” simply because they like to investigate the space scooped out by a slide-guitar? Or free jazz, because Tony Buck, after over 20 years in the Necks, is at that soothing stage where drums are invertebrate? Noise, because they know exactly when to let the machines do the talking?
It’s no cop-out to say that this all seems beside the point, nor is it a criticism to accuse Heaven And of keeping an overstuffed burlap sack of instruments at their beck and call. What’s more important than anything, however, is their patience. They shift their weight so carefully, rarely leaning on swallow-whole wallops, that you’ll be amazed to realize a warm and inviting guitar structure has grown too dense, closed-off exits, gone cannibal. Having listened to this album many, many times over the past few months, I’ve been better off tracking my own physiology than zigzagging dotted lines throughout the songs looking for exactly when something so tiny became so immense. I would liken climaxes to post-rock’s best-documented tsunamis if we had orchestral unison, if these guys were all angled toward the same rapture. But no: they know each other well, so well that they’re each in a unique position to subversively shred and unravel one another’s constructions.
They don’t keep this a secret, and some of the best moments on Bye And Bye I’m Going To See The King come off as jolly confessions of all the tensions wound up inside. Opener “Babylon” seems to have reached its tipping point when everything cuts out but some tipsy strings and Martin Siewert’s guitar, hissing and spitting and tearing at the walls in a panic almost too protracted to witness. That guitar has a similar episode in the lonely, exotic expanse of “When The Roll Is Called,” while a marimba trots in continuous circles behind it. Siewert’s really good at recasting the apparent structures of these songs. He waits like a predator, through silence or those minuscule dissonant organs wavering in and out of earshot — he waits, and then floods all the harmonic cracks with a scuzzy trailing chord. Other times the group stabs you in the back when your ear wants patterns, like the tame drum machine in the title track that goes so polyrhythm-wacko you’d swear the CD was skipping.
Somehow, ‘organic’ doesn’t do justice to the way these songs breathe, living and dying on tenuous assumptions; we’re talking Miller-Urey organic here, we’re talking primordial soup. The sense that they’re building these songs out of nothingness, out of silence, makes anything familiar at all feel like apotheosis. Hence, I suppose, the band name and its ever-dangling conjunction. The Babelian centerpiece of the album, “Blue, Even,” forms a recognizable tower out of the formlessness. You hear it congealing; you feel the electricity in the air as sounds pile on sounds — and suddenly a cavernous silence, the type you might imagine before being hit by an oncoming train. And the song locks into by far the most satisfying structure of the album: a two-chord stomp, doused in feedback, lap steel, and, oh yes, Buck’s monolithic 4/4 drums, invertebrate remark notwithstanding.
It’s all very fleeting, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. There was a time when I wanted more words to anchor this group’s various epiphanies (I could always give it a shot — what about how “Bye and Bye” awkwardly conflates “I’m leaving now!” with “…eventually…” and the death theme hits you sidelong, ’cause where else could you be going without having left yet?). But once you’ve been here a while, you don’t need them any more. It’d be crazy to assert that Heaven And are saying something important about those permeable membranes between the chemical, the biological, and the social, how we relate to one another and what keeps us going. But they are communicating something elemental, and like all great artists, they’ve chosen the perfect medium. There’s only so much a gutsy translator can flail here. They see mortal isolation in structure, mortal isolation in its absence — any writer can relate — so they make eye contact with each other, stand very, very still, and build.