This review comes with a little story from yours truly. You see, one day, I found myself attending a Jarboe concert by accident. Seriously! She just happened to be performing at a club I often go to. Anyway, so I enjoyed her show, even though it was cut short due to the ex-Swans singer's throat problems. I was particularly impressed by the wicked racket her live band was making but that was about it. I went ahead and ordered beer after beer, talked to some people, got wasted and woke up next morning with a huge hangover. While making myself some of my favorite hangover remedy (2x Paracetamol, 1x Aspirin, milk, toilet) I noticed an album in my coat pocket. Whoa! Where did this come from? Well, turns out I inadvertently ended up talking to one of the members of said live band and he gave me an album of his main band to review. In other words, this review of Inswarm's Surely Death Is No Dream is entirely the result of a complete accident, an act of pure fate.

So, what have we here? Well, it turns out Inswarm is an example of a somewhat forgotten type of industrial metal, as pioneered by Godflesh, Pitchshifter and of course, the mighty Swans. Although on tracks such as "Black Veil", the band lays down a pretty raucous and fast assault, Surely Death Is No Dream is primarily made up of plodding, monolithic shards or noise intended to crush the soul. There are some unavoidable comparisons to be made with modern post-metal noise merchants such as Cult Of Luna or Isis; however, this makes sense on account of shared influences. Moreover, Inswarm fares pretty well in these comparisons since this is a really powerful, moving album. One cannot miss just how dirty and punishing the guitar sound is here, with the well-known wave-like structure present in post-metal meandering from beautiful transcendental keyboard-laden moments to bursts of pure aggression. Frankly, it all works great together and inspires the kind of excitement that has long evaporated from this kind of music. Even the vocals, although screamed in a familiar fashion, are capable of conveying enough uninhibited emotion to truly make Surely Death Is No Dream a special album.

At the moment, Inswarm is certainly more known as Jarboe's backing band (ie. not at all); however, given the proper promotion, I can imagine Surely Death Is No Dream is capable of turning quite a few heads. Well, here is my 2 cents for the band's promotion fund, hope it helps, since this album deserves to be heard.


http://www.metalstorm.ee/pub/review.php?review_id=6977