The Clearing Path — Watershed Between Earth and Firmament

Avantgarde Music is certainly a label that lives up to its name. From the man’s own darkwave band Monumentum to the massively influential Darkspace, the label has a clear dedication to music that pushes the envelope. Sometimes that unearths veritable gems, but there are times when this search for interesting sounds fails. And yet other times, Avantgarde manages to unveil something I can’t quite decide if it’s good or bad. This is one of those times.

Watershed Between Earth and Firmament is surprisingly diverse release for an album no longer than an EP. Clocking in at under half an hour, this debut draws from a fairly extensive and diverse list of influences. And while I want to give Gramaglia some credit for that, it really is just the sort of experimental, hipsterish black metal pioneered by bands like Krallice a few years before but with a bit of hardcore influence tossed into the mix. And in that respect Watershed Between Earth and Firmament is a bit of a disappointing retread of a style that has fallen to the wayside. In spite of that, it manages to work well with a caveat: it has some unusual riffs that combine a bit of hardcore beatdown with a touch of black metal dissonance as they resolve, but this mashup sounds mismatched as often as it succeeds. Ordinarily, weak riffs are enough to ruin an album, but the drumming manages to salvage the situation. The active drum work lies heavily upon hardcore rather than black metal, really driving the tracks forward and giving them a genuine sense of urgency and passion. It pairs well with the overall mood of plaintive self-destruction, elevating what would have been a mediocre performance with background quality drumming to something much more. There are so many changes of pace and deft patterns that there’s always something to focus on.

Gramaglia’s vocal stylings contribute heavily to the album’s overall mood of loss and impotent rage. His distorted screams that cut through the middle of the sound like a ragged knife are powerful stuff. On tracks like “Sacred Mountain” and “Goddess Aura”, the inclusion of buried, layered cleans give the album a reverent tone. Initially, I found this addition to be jarring and out of place, but it’s come to grow on me.

Compositionally, Watershed Between Earth and Firmament is also an interesting album. The bulk of the album is made up of shorter tracks with changes in riffing style that lean from post-rock to dissonant black metal, alternating between the two. It’s not until the final instrumental track “This River Will Cary Me Towards the Grandest Light” that the whole album welds everything together into a sprawling, ten minute behemoth. This is really the only moment when everything suddenly becomes a unified, blackened jumble. I know that’s a paradox, but this whole album is paradoxical in many ways. From the mixture of the inhumane, incomprehensible black metal to the painfully human hardcore and post-rock emotions to the duality of the harsh and clean vocals, Watershed Between Earth and Firmament is all about establishing a bond between two disparate elements. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work, but everything comes together quite impressively in the end.

In the end, it’s difficult to judge Watershed Between Earth and Firmament. On some tracks, it feels like everything was thrown together randomly just to see how it would sound: the guitars are awkward or the transitions are off. It’s only on “This River Will Cary Me Towards the Grandest Light” that everything flows together seamlessly. If that were the case on the whole album, this would be an intensely powerful piece. Only time will tell what the future holds for The Clearing Path, but if Gramaglia manages to create enough material in the vein of the closer, it will be an impressive album for sure.