Diminishing — The Unnamable

[Anti-Corporate Music — 2023]★★★★★

Reviewed 30 May 2023by Colin Lang

Is it a law of diminishing returns that is referred to in the band’s name, the new project from Lane Oliver and Dave Brenner? The first album by this duo features all of the moody darkness one would expect from these two musicians, including the titles of The Unnamable’s nine tracks – “The Rats I’ve Fed”, “Barren Harvest”, “The Culmination of Years of Self-Abuse” – the list goes on. Pestilence is leading the horsemen here, and with more brow-beating evil conjurers out there than one can wave a scepter at, Diminishing manage to carve something more furtive than fecund here, as if the economics of paucity had informed their very means of production and compositional strategies. Diminishing returns for sure.

I kept waiting for things to get over-the-top and they never did, which put the entire listening experience into a kind of black hole of expectation. There are too many wizardry metaphors in this field of dark ambience/noise, but conjuring as a mode of both hearing and composing is – originality be damned! – pretty fitting. If the steel-toed boot fits, I guess. The instruments and source material are put through what feels like a dying star, slow and rapacious, emptied of any melodrama or pathos, a feat that is (repeating myself here) hard to pull off in this genre. I couldn’t help noticing the incredible restraint and expressionless character of the album as a whole, which came across like the negative space of all the posturing that usually accompanies sonic excursions to the underworld.

For fans of Oliver and Brenner’s other projects, and those in the noise/dark ambience community, there is no sun to be had, and that means, no false hope either. Very recommended!

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