FOREST SWORDS

ENGRAVINGS (Tri Angle)

18/20

Forest Swords’ Engravings — the heavily-anticipated follow up to 2010’s acclaimed Forest Daggers EP — is beset with a chasmic atmosphere reminiscent of one of the opening passages of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Lost of her parents, the terrified Chihiro finds herself stranded on the dark island bath house, awestruck and rendered woozy with fear by the blinding light of the approaching paddle steamer and the grotesquely elegant spirits disembarking from it. It’s a moment of aesthetic beauty stretched and warped, rendered into something unknown and unnerving, confused by the pitch surrounding it. Matthew Barnes’ music manages to place the listener in the same druggedly blurry, claustrophobic headspace.

Descriptions of his work have been consistently affixed with lists of genre signifiers, from stripped techno through drone, kraut rock, instrumental hip-hop and dub, though it’s his woodsy appropriation of the very latter which feels like a steady anchor to this record, even when overlaid with clattering percussion and chopped, stretched and blown-out string and vocal samples. Rhythmically, tracks stumble rather than lurch, occasionally locking in to moments of propulsion but more often than not queasily providing a skittering base for the eerie instrumentation overhead.

Though the record is aesthetically consistent, each track’s idiosyncratically treated parts mean endless sonic highlights, be they the Bollywood samples of Irby’s Tremor, the simple Roll The Dice-esque analogue loops of Anneka’s Battle, or Thor’s Stone‘s unnervingly blistered pipe sample, laid over a ghostly rave vocal and minimal kick drum. The record’s strongest track, though, is The Weight of Gold; the track’s gorgeous main riff — not miles away from the abstracted, overdriven harp work of Rhodri Davies — cutting sharp trebles through insistent clatter, buried dub and something of an actual, albeit unintelligible, vocal line. Engravings is a hugely haunting and genuinely idiosyncratic piece of work.

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Words: Tom Howells