Artist: It’s Not Night: It’s Space
Album: Our Birth Is But a Sleep and a Forgetting
When you hear that an album’s material was born out of rehearsals and recordings in mouldy warehouses, grimy basements, and the dusty backrooms of pizza shops, it makes you wonder if New York trio It’s Not Night: It’s Space (INNIS) are more of a punk band on their latest release, Our Birth is But a Sleep and a Forgetting .
But the truth is more comforting. The band stays much in their heavy psychedelic rock zone, while leaning in the space of stoner rock and drone at times on what is their third release. What starts with overlaying Vedic chants over spoken word about sleep, death and the afterlife on ‘Nada Bramha’, INNIS straight away establish that this is going to be one mind-expanding record. ‘The Beard Of Macroprosopus’ enters with sludgy low-ends, the lead guitar just weaving its way into the wall of sound that stomps and peaks. They start over on the imaginatively titled Across the Luster of the Desert Into the Polychrome Hills , building up the tempo. It’s evident here that INNIS are a three-piece band and while that’s limiting in some ways, they throw riff upon riff, driving the listener into a hypnotic jam until drummer Michael Lutomski changes things up with his fills.
There’s more steady jams that get coloured in by guitarist Kevin Halcott’s effect-heavy leads on songs like Starry Wisdom , which features a fitting flanged/phased-out splash of guitars. They eventually end noisily, like a good jam session, should, but that indicates that the album may not be for psych-rock newbie’s. After all, if you sit through songs that average at eight and nine minutes, the album would test short attention spans. The mellow Pillars In The Void arrives just after a lot of energy, and it sounds like a classic progressive/psych outtake, taking a page from the 1970s, where Lutomski just trudges on, matching bassist Tommy Guerrero’s heavy licks.
Of course, just because the songs follow a very improvised format, it belies just how thought-out Our Birth actually is. INNIS works within a similar range of tones and patterns for their songs and that’s evident by the time you get to the menacing closing track The Black Iron Prison And The Palm Tree . There’s much more range on this album than what even an experienced psychedelic rock fan can discern on the first listen.
