JARBOE : DISSECTED © 2002 $15.00

TERRORIZER
March 2004

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2003
NEUROSIS & JARBOE
A team-up nobody even dared to fantasize united two of the mightiest, brightest black suns of spiritual metal and industrial. Welding Neurosis' tumbling, tribal epic laments to ex-Swans diva Jarboe's torturous, feral soul-crushers, it entered a stream unexplored by humans and beasts alike, heading straight down the river Styx. Majestic and suffocating.

REVIEW
If you were to compile a wish list of musical collaborations, the only reason you might have left off this pairing is because, on paper, it's so appropriate, you could easily be forgiven the oversight. Neurosis and Jarboe 's former band, Swans, were once chained to parallel velocities, tracing the dynamic tension between their own, earth-bound humanity and the magnetism of the pitiless panoramas above - a consummate clash between brute force and humbling, metaphysical petition. And yet, 'Neurosis & Jarboe' is wholly unexpected, a journey through a far-off hinterland where the chief coordinates are life and death. 'N&J' sounds like a final journey, a stately yet desolate pilgrimage that's almost medieval in its sombre concession to destiny, its vast, blighted aural environment and forsaken, procession-like momentum. If, at times, Jarboe's empathetic angel of death presence appears to have soothed Neurosis' enflamed nerves, it's only so their natural momentum can start up again on a different, more stealth-like frequency; the subterranean, percussive pulse urging its way through opener 'Within', around Jarboe's hissed mantra. "If God wants to take me, he will," the arcing drone and rumble of 'Taker' and the doleful cadences of wafting throughout 'Receive'. It's only on 'Erase' that Neurosis' customary weight makes itself felt; amidst funereal keyboards, carrying itself with all the crushed resolution of someone dragging themselves across a moonlit desert while Jarboe scours her vocal cords raw. Above all, 'Neurosis & Jarboe' is an epic act of deliverance, a resolute awakening from grief, fearless examination of its aftermath and a passage into the unknown- caught up in a transition that offers the most all-seeing, most heartbreaking of perspectives. 'Try to remember / Everything that's lost." laments jarboe on the closing 'Seizure', with a compassion that will surely tear your soul apart, and it's a fusion of sorrow and salvation that burns brighter than a thousand suns.

-DANIEL SEI