NEUROSIS — Given To The Rising (review)

NEUROSIS — Given To The Rising album cover Album · 2007 · Atmospheric Sludge Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Phonebook Eater
6/10

"Given To The Rising" is the table of contents of Neurosis's career.

Finally we reach to the end to Neurosis’s career so far, “Given To The Rising”, the final chapter of the final trilogy. I had pretty high expectations for this, even though I was noticing it didn’t get such great feedback. I gave it a few spins, and I was unfortunately a little disappointed by it, it did not have the good qualities I expected it to have.

Post Metal is a label I never liked, I always found good alternatives. But with “The Eye Of Every Storm” and even more with this one, this choice is harder to maintain. It’s, sure, the usual Atmospheric Sludge Metal, but it’s hard to not fall also into Post-Rock territory in some of these songs. While in the last couple of albums the band has got much more experimental and open towards Post-Rock textures, “Given To The Rising” is much heavier than those releases, more aggressive, more distorted. It has many beastly moments that are gigantic sounding. The building is much more frequent than in “The Eye Of Every Storm”, which leads to one word; nostalgia. I’m guessing that Neurosis wanted to make with this album the “Through Silver In Blood” of the 00’s, but the result is not at all as good. The experimentation here is brave, the sounds the band uses to fill in the music is very fascinating and cool, and that’s one of the best elements this album has going for. It’s obviously a pretty ambitious album, even more than the previous effort, but everything here feels so tired and forced, it’s like Neurosis are using the same exact formulas they usually use on every album before this.

Maybe this is the time when Neurosis is the past, and the bands that feel influenced by them are the future. It would be kind of nice for this to be their last album, I feel like it’s a sort of summary of everything the band has done: ambience, heavy distortion, raging vocals, repetition, build ups, strange samples, Post-rock, Sludge Metal, Progressive. Imagine the band’s career as a book; the previous albums are chapters, “Given To The Rising” is the table of contents.

But enough of the bad talk: there are many moments here that are truly worth the time, like “Hidden Faces”, great hook and good structure, “Water Is Not Enough”, a heavy, strange song. Good moments are present also in the title track, another heavy song, the more experimental “Distill”, and the final epic “Origin”, eleven towering minutes that are very well put together.

A decent album overall, even though it does lack of a few essential elements such as originality. But it has enjoyable moments that a Neurosis fan like me would gladly listen to.
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