The love it took to leave you Colin Stetson

Album review

Writing music for films like Outlaws and Angels, Hereditary, and Colour Out of Space has given Colin Stetson the freedom to go big—and dramatic. The mixing of processed, altered sounds of saxophones as well as clarinets, French horn, flute, and cornet, results in the scale of these tracks being incredibly massive. Part of that comes from the natural resonances of the cavernous main room of the Fonderie Darling, a 144 -year-old converted foundry in Montreal where Stetson made the album in a week's time.

While the official press story is nebulous ("Stetson charts a carefully sequenced ride, traveling through intense territories punctuated with tragic melodies that seek transcendence, epic and frenzied shredders, and many shades of scary beauty, betrayal, and redemption"), Stetson is more specific about what influenced this huge, powerful work.  He refers to it as a journey where he found the need to "delve back into and really steep myself in the music that made me: early electronica, doom metal; and to counterbalance that whole aesthetic with my own personal musical history."

The results here are nothing short of spectacular.  In "Green and grey and fading light" (Stetson has a peculiar penchant for long, lowercase titles), percussion pecks away while his bass saxophone murmurs with urgency while ghostly sax wails punctuate the background. Liberal use of reverb gives the sax parts a mountainous presence. "So say the soaring bullbats" begins with an ominous low tone before more spectral voices, fashioned via processed horn tones, float in. Engineered by Jonas Verwijnen, the sonic emphasis is on creating gigantic, often colossal dimensions. There are echoes of Jerry Goldsmith's soundtrack to the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes in "The Six" where Stetson opens with horn blasts layered with insect-like buzzing, before the sax falls into a steady rhythm while continued voice-like squalls give the whole piece an unsettling glaze. "Bloodrest" closes with fluttering that creates a distinctly lighter, more hopeful mood. Possessed by a creative vision like no other, Stetson is reinventing the instrument with innovative emotional range and complexity. © Robert Baird/Qobuz