Asva – What You Don’t Know Is Frontier [Southern]

What You Don’t Know Is Frontier starts like an ear glued to a shell with the ocean crying within. In moments, an electric pulse rushes through the sea and swallows its calm hum. As doom infested chords gradually build alongside funeral organs, the resonations make apparent that What You Don’t Know Is Frontier is an honest title for a haunting expedition into unknown darkness. As the second track, “Christopher Columbus” slowly sneaks in, Asva redirects the ignorant explorers journey by entrapping his ship in a glacier. Led by Stuart Dahlquist of Burning Witch and Sunn O)))), What You Don’t Know Is Frontier is a reverence to his brother who recently passed away. Yet the homage doesn’t quite set in until the albums intimate opus, “A Game in Hell, Hard Work in Heaven” drifts into slow reflective motion. Compared to the rest of the album, “A Game in Hell, Hard Work in Heaven” commences in serenity, like the eye of a hurricane, in which the damage of the disaster is mirrored by a few moments of ominous stillness. “A Trap for Judges,” the albums twenty-four minute finale develops through the elongated vibrations of a doomed atmosphere before vanishing under a bed of church organs. What You Don’t Know Is Frontier sees Asva furthering their droning experimentation started on 2005’s Futurists Against the Ocean and taking their sensorial sound and protracting it. The record is a breathtaking exploration of composition, but it is disappointing to lose the shear terror of Jessika Kenney’s vocals: an onslaught that gave Futurists Against the Ocean an atypical edge. Not only in that Kenney is one of the few female doom vocalists, but also due to the operatic force of her voice and its effective shaping of Asva’s initial sound.

Bardos Freedoom