WHALESONG: Leaving A Dream
Release year: 2023
Label: Zoharum/Old Temple
Talk about a massive album. Polish Whalesong‘s newest, third full length album spans two discs and consists in total of two hours and ten minutes of music. That’d be a lot to wrap your head around even if it were straightforward music… and when it isn’t, it’s doubly so.
And as such, even after ten spins, Leaving A Dream confuses and surprises me. And to some extent, eludes me. But I don’t think I’m going to get a better grip of it in the foreseeable future, so let’s just dig in.
Metal Archives describes Whalesong as an industrial metal band. Whilst it’s true that there is both industrial and metal in this mix, just cobbling those two together into a genre descriptor by no means does justice to the amorphous entity that Whalesong is.
Doom metal. Post-doom metal. Sludge. Post-rock. Noise rock. Industrial. Dark Ambient. Drone. Jazz. Those are some of the most prominent approaches Whalesong utilize in their take on thoroughly experimental music. Ranging from disjointedly slowed down, sluggish moments of weirded-out metal to the experimental breaking down of structure and tonality of jazz, all the way to the non-music of droning dark ambient, Whalesong refuse to let their expression be pigeonholed easily.
Whether it’s the almost Angelo Badalamenti style drama of We Are Free or the eerie jazz of A Distant Memory, or the ethereal-yet-heavy riffing of We Have Never Really Lived, or the understated droning dark ambience of shekissedmewithhervenomouslips, Whalesong however manage to keep things together atmospherically. It’s not an album drenched in the darkness of desolation or destitution, of nightmares and abominations, as could perhaps be assumed from the genres explored. No, rather, the atmospheres are surprisingly peaceful and at times even serene – but with a somewhat disconcerting undercurrent, with a shadow creeping in from without. Emotions of letting go: of a loved one, of a dream, of life. There is a darkness here, too.
Testament to Whalesong’s ability to craft complex tracks that still carry their weight are the two longest tracks; the aforementioned shekissedmewithhervenomouslips, and the apex point of the album, the 27 minutes long From The Ashes. The latter combines basically all colours of Leaving A Dream’s musical palette into a sprawling, complex and incredibly rich tapestry of sound and atmosphere.
The extraordinary thing about Leaving A Dream is how well it carries its own weight. From the sheer massiveness of the running time, to the multiplicity of musical styles explored, to the amorphous compositions, there are so many points where the album could fail – but doesn’t.
Equally suited for focused listening or being played in the background, Leaving A Dream is an album of ghostly beauty. You can spin it all in one go whilst you’re concentrating on something else, and it will provide a suitably ambient soundtrack to it. Or you can sit down and focus on the album and be carried away by it. Either way, it will carry you to someplace beautiful yet ominous, peaceful yet unnerving.
Like a dream with a nightmare concealed under the surface.
Only Death Is Real 