Rosetta

Wake/Lift

[4/5]


The cover art for Wake/Lift depicts what appears to be a collage of cranes, scaffolding, telecommunications towers and oil rig legs. Imagine all that industrial-grade steel falling on your kneecaps. Now you have an idea how heavy this album is. “Red In Tooth And Claw” and “Lift (Part 1)” are sledgehammer kisses mixing Isis’ thunder, My Bloody Valentine’s six-string shimmer and a drum-pounding not unlike classic Keith Moon all wrapped in repetitive, hypnotic melodies. When this Philly quartet aren’t dropping slabs of muscular “metalgaze” on the listener at a consistent 75 bpm, they often retreat into sullen musical moods, summoning Pink Floyd’s psychedelic depression as counteraction to the dense smackdowns of “Wake” and “Monument”-the sort of noise that triggers tectonic tremors. Delicately painful and dynamically brutal, the way good experimental metal was meant to be. (TRANSLATION LOSS) Kevin Stewart-Panko