Before Hostile Architecture brought Ashenspire to the attention of part of the metal press, the Glasgow group had already laid the foundations of its identity with Speak Not of the Laudanum Quandary. You find the same refusal to choose between the most abrasive black metal and sudden jazz or post-rock detours that seem lifted from an entirely different record, all cemented by a voice that leans more toward declamation than singing. It’s an album that unsettles from the first listen, and demands that you accept losing your footing.
A rhythm section that breathes like a wind instrument
What strikes immediately is the way drums and guitars constantly elude any logic of repeated riffs. The structures advance in fits and starts, stop dead, restart at a different tempo, as if the band were trying to shatter all comfort in listening. Sections that are almost chamber-like, carried by sonorities evoking jazz, interweave between bursts of blast beats and glacial tremolos. The grain of the production, fairly raw, lets you hear cymbal crashes and string attacks without ever smoothing things over: you sense a band playing in the studio as if still finding its form, which gives the record an almost organic tension.
Voice as political text
The singer doesn’t really interpret: he chants, he harangues, he shifts from black metal shrieks to near-theatrical diction, sometimes close to spoken word. This approach, which would become the group’s signature, is already fully present. The texts, engaged and sharp, are never mere pretexts: they structure the rhythm of phrases, impose breaks, and give the whole an almost pamphleteering charge. At times you think of a black mass where preaching has replaced psalmody, with cold rage rather than brute anger.
The limits of a gesture still being refined
If the formal ambition impresses, the album suffers in places from questionable cohesion: some transitions between jazz sequences and black metal unleashings seem imposed rather than conceived as a single gesture, and listening can give the impression of a patchwork of good ideas not always fully digested. The record doesn’t yet have the quasi-cinematic fluidity that would characterize the group’s later releases. It often remains in demonstration mode, the energy of experimental gesture sometimes outweighing overall construction, which can wear over the full listening experience.
Still, an album that clearly deserves attention, less for its perfection than for the audacity of the project it carries. Ashenspire refines here a language of its own, made of ruptures, controlled dissonances, and discourse that refuses all complacency. You already sense the seeds of what would fully blossom later in their career, and it’s precisely this feeling of ambitious work in progress that makes listening compelling: you hear a band searching, sometimes fumbling, but never cheating. For those who love metal that shakes its own foundations, it’s an essential piece to discover, even if it hasn’t yet reached the total mastery of their later records.
