REZN guide us through the sonics ins and outs of their dreamy, expansive and boundary-destroying new album.
Rites of Passage
The curtains open and you get a glimpse of the new directions we’re about to go on this record. It’s a grounding and rolling riff that calibrates you for a heavier approach than we’ve ever explored, so it felt perfect as the first track. By the time you get to the end, we wanted the listener to look like that Maxwell guy in the chair just hanging on by a thread.
Transient
We take a sharp left turn here to explore some different shades of prog, both rhythmically and instrumentally. The sax makes a King Crimson-esque appearance hidden within chuggy and swirling textures, a fusion of elements that requires open-mindedness for whatever comes next. All of these sounds really shouldn’t go together, but here they are thriving in front of you, and it’s your job to make sense of it all. Luckily, it’s not too long before you’re totally eviscerated by the chorus at the end, so you didn’t have to spend that much time grasping at reality.
Cloudfall
Keeping up the faster pace of this record, Cloudfall finally leads you to water with some barreling riffs and ultra catchy hooks. This one has more of a pop sensibility than we’ve really done before, but it was fun to apply that structure to some heavier and dissonant guitar tones that keep everything flowing into the next part nicely. Spencer’s lap steel guitar shines on this song and smooths out the rough rhythmic edges with the gliding twang that cosmic country does best.
Aerial Birth
The sparkling tendrils in the opening guitar riff made this one perfect for your first breath of fresh air, and a moment to dive into the emotional and introspective elements of the record. The idea is that both the verse and chorus share a connectedness with the forest, embodying the swaying fractals of tree branches in the verse and the dense, rich soil of the understory in the chorus. It’s the classic chill / heavy dichotomy that we love so much, but its placement in the track listing really makes it stand out as one of our favourite songs on the record.
Devotion
This is the halfway point of the album, and honestly a good place to stop if you like your stories with a happy ending. We wanted to transform an interlude idea into an actual full-bodied instrumental, so the violin and cello arrangements take this song to that next level of beauty we could never achieve with just one guitar. The crunching sample you hear throughout the track is a recording of Rob walking through leaves, and then slowly modulated into smithereens as the strings take you into a higher plane.
The Vessel
You’re snapped out of the dream and into a new nightmare with the most evil riff on the record. We tried to make this one feel like a relentless descent with a few twists and turns, but otherwise you’re just spiralling downwards in each section of the song. It basically leaves no room for respite until the final notes of the song, which arrive like a refreshing splash of cold water to the face.
Escher
After The Vessel’s wake-up call, Escher relies on the lapsteel melody to carry the song through a dreary but trudging pace. It has that straight-and-narrow grunge vibe we love, but with our own kind of hazy twang to keep the song in a constant floating state. It initially felt like a departure from the rest of the songs in the writing phase, but this one showcases the lap steel in a way that cements the instrument as a guiding voice echoing throughout the album.
Primal Thread
We started playing this one live before any of the other new songs, and it’s already become one of our favourites in the set. It’s a rare instance of us pulling off the Frankenstein song structure, where we have two completely different ideas that blended together perfectly. It feels awesome live because the energy just translates so well through the crowd, so it’s really nice to have that back-and-forth conversation as the song moves from cruising altitude and descends into a hellish and pummeling breakdown in its final moments.
Terra Preta
This song was initially further up in the record, but once we tried it at the end, it really helped tie the whole album together into this beautiful conclusion. It has the spacey, Pink Floyd-on-top-of-a-mountain feeling, but also with totally crushing choruses that give each dynamic its own realm to occupy throughout the song. For something that feels like this thought-out cinematic journey, this song really came together quickly, and each new part just felt intuitive as we were writing it. The strings come back in full force at the end of this song, and they help culminate everything into this maximalist moment that defines the record.Â
