MAUDLIN OF THE WELL

This is the second album in a duo of albums that almost seem like the same album (quite alot of "albums", there), released by the grandeur maudlin of the Well. Leaving Your Body Map explores different tones and sounds, and at the same time sounds acceptable to a person just beginning to listen to experimental music. This album, is quite possibly, the greatest album released by maudlin of the Well, and if anyone is curious about the band, this might be the best window to their great catalog.

This album opens up with "Stones of October Sobbing" a song that may seem odd to some, but in reality is great. Stones of October Sobbing begins with a mellow flute and guitar playing, and eventually leads to more riffs and infamous death growls (using "infamous" in a good manner). In the midst of this chaos, trumpets sing a tune that sounds, very oddly, like Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire". In text, you might be confused as to why I'd say this song is good, but I suggest for you to listen to it for yourself.

Following Stones, "Gleam in Ranks" rises from the ashes. This song is upbeat and catchy. It has strong guitar riffs, powerful vocals, and fast drumming all packed in about 4:00.

"Bizarre Flowers/ A Violent Midst" has a haunting tone to it. Starting with ringing bells and soft vocals, the song then blasts into a... "violent midst" you could say. With a distorted guitar ringing in the background, you can hear untamed and unclear screams in the background. It then comes back to Byron's death growls, a catchy solo, and ends with quiet, and yet again, "haunting" vocals.

"(Interlude 3)" is mostly an acoustic guitar piece, to prepare you for the next set of tracks.

"A Curve That To An Angle Turn'd" begins with a folksy guitar riff. But not long after, the song immediately explodes into a slow, heavy doom metal piece, with more death growls dominating the music. Then, we come to a part with sad guitar chords and vocals from Maria-Stela Fountoulakis.

But then it all leads to the song "Sleep is a Curse" Much like "Marid's Gift of Art" from their previous release, "Bath", Sleep is a Curse is an acoustic piece that rests you from the previous chaotic tracks.

"Riseth the Numberless" is a 2 part song with good use of distorted keyboards. It is a rather simple song, and has strong relations to progressive metal.

"(Interlude 4), like 3, is a simple acoustic piece, only this time used to lead to the album finale.

"Monstrously Low Tide" opens with a strong, heavy riff, but as unexpected, tunes down to mellow piano and acoustic guitar riffs. It floats to the end like a raft in water with ambient (I guess you could use that word) guitar riffs. This song is almost like a peek into Kayo Dot, what Toby Driver is soon to become.

My suggestion is that you should definitely get this album. When i say essential, I mean this album is essential entirely to avante garde metal and rock, which is why i give this a 4 star rating. Again, that still doesnt mean this album shouldn't be heard by a plentiful amount of prog fans. But, this album is definitely essential to avante garde music and all who enjoy it.

Part of the Second represents my first venture into the post-metal genre. I was pretty impressed initially about the level of eclecticism. These guys use a ton of instruments, especially heavy use of violin, not to mention a heavy, audible bass. The playing is pretty intricate, with a variety of tempo and time signature changes. Unfortunately, I found it messy, and frankly, a lot of it simply went nowhere for me. But the moments I did find good, were very enjoyable.

'Excerpt'' truly surprised me; this song is extremely good. It is very diverse, yet there is nothing over the top about it. It changes tempo and time signature a few times, like the subtle 7/8 to 4/4 shift in the beginning. There are a few great melodies too, especially the simple, but effective piano parts near the end. But perhaps what I like most about it is the very spacey, almost empty atmosphere it conveys.

Unfortunately, the rest of the songs don't nearly meet this same quality. 'Another Excerpt' is alright, especially the crazy bass riff near the end. 'Rose Quartz Turning to Glass,' 'Clover Garland Island,' and 'Laboratories of the Invisible World' all have some good ideas, but they're few and far between, and it's mostly just aimless rambling.

Some people might like this album, especially those already accustomed to the genre. I feel like there was a lot of potential in this, but for whatever reason it just didn't captivate me.

4/10

"Secret Song" is a single that was released on mini-CD in 2001. The song was released with a hidden message, said to contain the link between the two albums "Bath" and "Leaving Your Body Map".

The music is very much like a mixture of the music on "Bath" and "Leaving Your Body Map". There is however a certain ambience that is not present on either of the albums. The opening guitar line is a variation of the opening motif on "Bath", which gives the track a sense of familiarity. The song then moves to their signature doom metal sound, and later shifts to a slower, more jazzy feel. The song has a little more direction than most of the repertoire on "Bath" and "Leaving Your Body Map", which unfortunately removes the sense of spontaneity that is present in the two albums.

The lyrics to "Secret Song" are a puzzle which is said to explain and link the two albums "Bath" and "Leaving Your Body Map". The story of the two albums is rather shrouded, which is explained by the fact that the concept behind them was based upon Toby Driver's experiences in astral projection, a form of meditation that I engage in regularly. I have spent time researching the meaning behind the lyrics of this song, but like many other fans of maudlin of the Well, I have not been completely successful.

The lyrics of the song are: Oraios, Topio, Petra, Ypnos I saw the branches of a tree Falling on these planets Binah, Geburah, Hod, Yesod I read into these four songs The numbers of the lines In a magical language And wrote the first words And this is a great secret.

The first set of words is in Greek: Beautiful, Landscape, Stone, Sleep. These words all relate to the titles of maudlin of the Well songs. Beautiful = "They Aren't All Beautiful", Landscape "Geography", Stone = "Stones of October's Sobbing", Sleep = "Sleep is a Curse" . The second set of words, Binah, Geburah, Hod, Yesod, originate from the Kabbalah Tree of Death, named the Qliphoth.

I do not fully understand the lyrics to this song, but I do believe that the song implies that the astral realms that the maudlin of the Well mastermind Toby Driver visits, are haunted by evil/negative deities.

This single is a great collector's item for progressive rock fans, and should be part of any maudlin of the Well collection. 3.5 stars. ☮ Peace ☮

Part the Second is a subtle and excellently executed album. No one genre is large enough to encompass all the sounds on this album. It seems to exist at a triple point between metal, chamber music and experimental jazz. Over the course of each of its five meticulously crafted and highly progressive tracks maudlin of the Well will emphasize one form over another and transition to another style or hybrid with an uncanny ease. The result is album which demands your full attention to truly appreciate. The album is mostly darker, but it does not do it justice to say it is morose or depressed. For, it appears to be just as easy for the band to explode with a sudden a powerful lightness as it was for them to morph stylistically.

Needless to say, this is an album which does not lend itself to straightforward description. It is a intricate and emotional masterwork. It is obvious that great care was taken to achieve an exacting sound. It can at times be quite challenging, but I do not think we would be members of PA if we were not interested in challenging ourselves musically. Part the second doesn't sound a whole lot like the album mei by echolyn, but it is about the closest thing I can compare it to. Both are vast and immensely creative. Both also tend to overstep their bounds from time to time. That challenging nature means that the whole course is not always entirely enjoyable. Ride it through though, and you will not regret it.

The aspects I find least enjoyable are the vocals, and select passages interspersed throughout. For me, the best complete track on the album is the opening excerpt and what I would consider to be the highest point, the screaming wall out sound which dominates the middle stretch of the final track.

Part the Second is a 4 out of 5 for me, right on the cusp of being something more. I recommend it for anybody, provided you keep an open mind. This is an album which requires a lot of concentration. So do not expect to get the most out of it if you leave it playing in the back ground.

Name of the Examinee - maudlin of the Well -Bath

Date of Report - 7/16/2012

Examiner - Dr. Prog

Referral Question/Reason For Testing

Maudlin of the Well was referred to me by many of his friends after I had written a diagnosis of depression for him based on his work, Part the Second. His friends insisted I had misdiagnosed him, and if I would just give an evaluation based on his work in Bath, I would see why.

Examinee Background Information

Maudlin's works deal primarily with astral projection - he describes his approach to music as trying to "find" it rather than "compose" it. He actively practices the techniques of astral projection and lucid dreams, from which he claims to be able to "bring back" pre-existing music from the astral plane.

Notes from the Doctor's Examination

Maudlin came into my office, and he was quite calm at first. As we chatted, I was struck by an immediate sense of what an incredibly pleasant, calm, well-adjusted person he was, and after 7 or so minutes, I began to wonder if I had, indeed, misdiagnosed him, or perhaps he had undergone treatment and was cured. Then he began to describe to me some ideas of his that seemed a little out of the ordinary, though still coherent. However, his ideas began to make less and less sense, and then he abruptly underwent a dramatic personality change and became very agitated - his words flowing quickly in an angry tone. Over the course of the next few minutes, I began to feel as if I were talking to a completely different person than the one who had walked through my door a few minutes before. The ideas he expressed and the reasons for his anger seemed logical, but it was such a sudden transformation that I felt as one who had walked out of a movie to visit the loo during a quiet scene and returned to chaos, bewildered and confused as to what had occurred during my absence. As quickly as this started, it stopped, and he became unnervingly peaceful and calm again. He began speaking lovingly and peacefully to what seemed to be a child, much as a loving father would do. No sooner had this finished, than his character transformed once again into what I can only describe as the mythical creature - the faun. He pranced around the office as if he were dancing in a meadow for a few minutes...and then he stopped and his eyebrow raised in a somewhat sinister expression. Over the course of the next few minutes one of the strangest things I have beheld in my office occurred - it seemed I was witnessing two personalities manifesting themselves in the same person at the same time, both speaking simultaneously. Once again, he was instantly calm and collected. He spoke in a very normal, quiet tone, and the effect was eerie, after having witnessed the mood changes from moments before. But nothing could prepare me for what happened next - quite suddenly Maudlin screamed in quite a painful and frightening shriek, and then his voice took on a gutteral tone. It did not sound at all like I was speaking to the same person any more - at times his voice sounded like multiple voices at once, some screaming in pain, some growling in hatred, some quite sinister and others quite frightened out of their minds. I was quite frightened - frozen in place, unable to move or react. I wondered if I were witnessing a man possessed by another entity...or an even more horrifying idea - many entities. As suddenly as this had begun, Maudlin's personality once again changed quite suddenly and he resembled a sane, coherent, normal person. These dramatic changes convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was at the very least speaking to a very unstable man, one who was a danger to himself and to others. But this idea was not what had me frightened for my life, as I have seen many unstable patients before. What had me scared witless was what I had witnessed moments before - the only way I can describe what had transpired was that it seemed that Maudlin had been taken over and controlled for a few moments by a tortured, hateful creature whose only desire was to see all it came into contact with undergo the same pain and torture it had undergone. A being of pure spite and evil who had no logic or reason, but only wanted to see harm come to me. These events put me in a state of frozen panic, and I broke out in a cold sweat and began to tremble. I stopped the exam short, made up a very flimsy sounding excuse I'm sure, and rushed home in quite a state of shock.

Nightmares haunted me in my sleep, and I woke many times throughout the night. The next day, however, I told myself that I was a professional and could handle this. I convinced myself there was a scientific explanation for what I had witnessed, and determined to finish my examination of the patient. I scheduled a second appointment with Maudlin. This time, he entered the room and as he spoke to me, he had an accent I had not noticed before...it sounded like...hillbilly. Then, suddenly, the accent disappeared, and he spoke quite lazily, almost listlessly. But his tone began to take on more tension and intensity. But he calmed again, and then as he spoke to me, it was as if he was talking to me from very far away, or as if we were talking on the telephone with a bad connection. He seemed as one who was not actually present in the room, almost like a hologram of himself. He stopped speaking, and the strangest thing occurred...he began to dance, wordlessly, in an ethnic fashion. This continued for a few minutes, and then he stopped and raised an eyebrow, turning to me with an expression on his face that was filled with hate and intention of harm. Quite suddenly he began to leap about the room, smashing things and throwing them about as an animal, screaming in a guttural fashion. His strength was inhuman - I, of course, had immediately called in the orderlies, but we were not able to restrain him - he was able to cast us off as a fully grown adult casts off small children clinging to him. The group of us were barely able to restrain him, and his tortured screams were the stuff of nightmare. But in the space of seconds he changed his tone to one that sounded...playful. This was only the more frightening as the sinister personality we had just witnessed was still shining through the playful tones, and then once again he shrieked in an other-worldly voice at us in pure spite and hatred, threatening all kinds of unspeakable evil. One of the orderlies, of course, drugged him, and after the drugs seemingly took affect he drifted off peacefully, or so we thought. We began to drag him towards a holding cell, but he suddenly leapt out of our arms with inhuman strength, shrieking and growling once again with seemingly multiple voices of hate and tortured pain and fright. As he did, the lights in the hallway began to flicker on and off as if a catastrophic thunderstorm were affecting the electrical work...and Maudlin then began to sing in the voice of...a woman, and as he did so, he began to float up into the air, and a wind blew through the hallways, smashing the doors open and shut with its strength. We all cowered on the floor as this occurred around us, quite frightened for our lives, and as the fury intensified, we closed our eyes in fright. The wind stopped, but we heard many voices around us speaking menacingly. They were not coming from a singular location, but were all around us, speaking in a language none of us could understand, and they did not resemble any known languages either - it was as if we were hearing the voices from another plane of existence. The voices faded away, and as some of us dared to open our eyes, we saw that Maudlin was nowhere in sight. It was as if the strange events from moments before had never even occurred - the hallway lights were on, and there was no mess to clean in my office. Maudlin has since not been seen by any of us - it was as if all we had witnessed had been merely a dream. But this cannot erase the fearful images I have witnessed, and I hope and pray I shall never come into contact with Maudlin ever again.

Back to reality

Being (somewhat) serious now - I found this album to be quite unsettling, especially after I researched it and found out the ideas behind the music and how it was "discovered." Before I had done my research, I thought the music was quite strange, and afterwards I felt it was quite frightening. So as you can see, my meeting with Maudlin of the Well was a very unnerving experience for me, and one I do not wish to repeat, but there is no telling how he reacts in front of other people in other settings, so others may have a completely different experience.

Originally written for www.seaoftranquility.org

For me, Maudlin of the Well's comeback album shares a very similar approach to earlier albums such as Bath or Leaving Your Body Map, and consequently shares the same problems. A range of musical territories are explored, but they don't seem to hang together very well; individual sections of songs can be quite beautiful, but the transitions between those segments don't make much musical sense to me and so the effect they are going for eludes me. To be honest, I think there are other avant-metal and post-metal bands who do this sort of thing much better, but if you liked their earlier albums I suppose you'll enjoy this one too.

This is a review I've been avoiding for a long while, because I always knew it would just end up as a rambling gushing of how much I love it.

So I will spare you one of my lengthy reviews, (especially one that may just result as 500 ways of saying "this is great") and just say: "Part the Second" is beautiful post rock. I already am struggling to find a way to continue without repeating myself so I'll leave the analysis at that: beautiful.

I can say this is not a metal release in any way, motW has left that long behind. There are some crunchy guitar parts, but they are never really heavy, and certainly don't enter "metal" territory. Like any post rock the music is atmospheric, progressive, intricate and subtle. However, it never gets very intense, (like GY!BE for example) nor does it stay too long in the "mellow" parts that so many dislike about post rock. The composition is dare I say, genius. Toby Driver is one of the better musical minds of our time and "Part the Second" is another chapter in the book.

So I've forgone my usual style of review and have to ask that you try this album for yourself. I struggle to find the words to accurately review it, and I don't want to do this album an injustice. A beautiful, atmospheric work of perfection.

Give it a listen for yourself, after all it's available for free from the band's website! What have you got to lose?

"Part the Second" gets a 5 star rating, but I'd like to say this one goes my personal "six star" mantle.

Masterpiece

Progressive music can be quite a mystery sometimes. The genre itself is so ecclectic, and style varies widely. Some prefer a very simplistic approach while others (myself included) revel in complexities. Often, when I see someone giving a very harsh review or rating to an album I think is a masterpiece, I think that it's quite possible that this person just doesn't know enough about music theory to decipher the hidden complexities of the album that I see and love about it. I say this not to try to appear superior in intellect, but to outline the struggle that the progressive music listener must go through in order to understand a progressive artist that is new to him or her, and how often a piece of progressive music must grow on a person. I know I've judged many things badly, and then come around to love the same piece of music later as I've gained an understanding of some of the hidden complexities of that piece of music. This album, and the reason it is beloved enough to receive an astounding number of 5 star ratings, baffles me. I wanted to decipher the mystery of why it was so beloved, and listened to the album 3 times in the span of a week to try to understand. But I felt that it suffered from two key issues, that distracted me very much from anything else as I listened to this album.

The first, and most immediately grating issue to me was the singer. He has a moaning, whiny style that grated on me, and slowly sucked away my will to live. I felt as if I were listening to a personification of C.S. Lewis' literary character Puddleglum, or maybe Charles Dickens' character Uriah Heep...or perhaps even a male version of the character Bella Swan from the Twilight series.

The second issue I had with this album was I felt there was no dynamic - the entire album seemed to stay at a slow, melancholy pace, never showing joy, triumph, anger, or even extreme sorrow - just melancholy. It was like the music was disinterested in life: it went to bed early and slept late into the day, eating nothing but cold cereal all day and never getting out of its pajamas, and liked to write in its journal about how it didn't think it could live without Edward...oh, whoops, I'm mixing this up with Twilight again.

Perhaps one day, many days from now, I will come to an understanding of why this album is so beloved. But to me, trying to understand how something so ploddingly slow could be considered so worthy of attention left a bad taste in my mouth. Now, looking back on this, rather than distaste I am left with more of a sense that this is simply unremarkable.

My reaction to Leaving Your Body Map is, predictably, much like my reaction to its companion album Bath. Whilst Maudlin of the Well are doubtless good at the different genres they dabble in on these two albums, the problem is that dabbling is all they do - none of the individual parts are top-notch examples of death metal or post-rock or any of the other genres they bring to bear, but because they're all put next to each other people tend to think Maudlin of the Well are doing something radical and new when in reality they're just doing a lot of old stuff that other people did better and with more focus.

Though I do find Maudlin of the Well's music rather touching at times, I can't help but feel that Bath comes across more as a random jumble of songs suggesting directions the band might have chosen to excel at had they focused on them as opposed to being a cohesive work in its own right. It's all quite technically precise and the various songs are alright examples of the forms they present - the death metal bits are OK death metal, the post-rock parts are OK post- rock and so on - but I can't help but wonder what could have resulted if the band had just picked a direction and stuck with it.