THE ASSAYER

"Controlled by faith, fear, and lies"

Among the various aspects to the term "assayer", these definitions seem to strike closest to the center of this track from GALLOWS HYMN:

2. To examine by trial or experiment; put to a test: assay one's ability to speak Chinese.

3. To evaluate; assess: assayed the situation before taking action.

4. To attempt; try.

Darkly, Richly Down-tuned and Brutally Complex

And that's because in this new track, GALLOWS HYMN founders Nicholas Spevak and Zach Hornung, along with some talented vocalists, seem to be exploring the divide and contention between spiritual views.

Who gets to decide what is 'true' and what is 'heresy'?

In this intelligent and poetic exploration, GALLOWS HYMN employs a variety of instrumentation including down-tuned clean guitar passages (opening), deep and resonant bass guitar lines, gritty and mean guitar riffs, and snaky, sinuous lead guitar, plus what sounds like mellotron choral sounds.

The Vocals

Olga Nuit brings her clean, high-register voice, interlaced with Jeremiah Johnson's menacing growling, and enhanced with Laura Gonzalez's additions- to suggest the interplay between those who believe they are competent to determine truth from heresy, those who 'assay' for themselves in whatever ways make sense to them, and meanwhile suggesting that one's truth may look like heresy to another?

The Inquisition

I thought of nothing so much as the destructive and disgraceful ways super-religious folk seek to impose their truth on others- as exemplified among other examples in the long centuries of Inquisition.

This particular track opens with dark down-tuned guitar lines and we hear the punchy deep bass enter, then solemn mellotron choral effects. The clean high-register female vocal soon enters.

This grows and there is that effective call-and-response male and female vocal work. Guitars get heavier and crunchier, and again that soaring female voice.

This subsides, and an active deep bass guitar line underlies echoing clean lead guitar. Again heavy riffs enter and that growling male voice.

Another extended deep bass guitar line intertwines with sinuous lead guitar, and back to those crunchy guitar riffs.

And the ending

In a satisfying way, those grand and solemn mellotron choral effects accentuated by guitar and bass notes bring this complex and rich track to a close.

My Conclusions

GALLOWS HYMN brings mastery, intelligence, complexity, provocative thematic lyrics, and progressive musical ideas, and mixes these into a spiritual brew well worth quaffing. Easily four stars.

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