Scott Kelly

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Personalmente preferisco cmq l'approccio stlistico e la voce di Von Till.

Having gone from raw crossover purveyors to apocalyptic doom specialists, Neurosis have always kept critics and fans guessing throughout their three decade career. When it was announced that co-founding guitarist, Scott Kelly would be releasing a solo album, I didn’t know what to really expect. From the opening, folk-tinged chording of “The Ladder in my Blood,” it is clear that the record would be a much different animal from his primary output. The track listing on The Wake has more in common with rustic Americana from the likes of Mark Lanegan and even Will Oldham than it does with anything on the later Neurosis material. Kelly’s monotone vocals possess a gravely and low tone to them in the vein of the aforementioned vocalists and maybe a less-animated Nick Cave.

For most of the album, there is some bass and lap-steel guitars sprinkled throughout, all you get is Kelly’s vocals accompanied by acoustic guitars. This works nicely with the general bleakness of the lyrics laid out. On the depressive “In My World,” the singer laments, “the weather never changes in my world,” and the stark arrangement frames the song in a very fitting way. As interesting as the melding of the American Gothic styled imagery and bare-minimum structures are, it would have been great to hear some piano and maybe a blues harp on a couple of the tracks to lend the recordings some color. But then again, I don’t think that’s what Kelly wanted anyway.

In James Joyce's Dublin, the streets inhale and exhale an Irishness that is so fundamentally elemental that it's more a part of the landscape than the actual landscape--which is to say: his books are more real than the real space they describe. And so it is with Scott Kelly, great guitar griot and founder of Neurosis, and his Wake. Or The Wake, to be precise. Its reality supersedes the place, the space, and the particulars that gave birth to it. Mixing imagery that borders on a bold and stark contemplation of the limits of our earthly existence via our failed loves, efforts, conceits, and even our less-than-noble other failures (blissfully unspecified and probably unnecessary to have them specified: if you're alive, the blanks are easy enough to fill in), The Wake, with its lion-in-the-winter woe, wrenches the almost inexpressibly sad into seven songs that sound like what you hear when you're just about to not hear anything anymore.

"The weather never changes in my world." Goddamned right.

With only an acoustic guitar and his voice, Kelly crams the lilt, lift, and longing of several lives well lived into five-some-odd minutes of every song. Not only would this record not have been possible at any other point in his life - or ours, for that matter - than now, it also seems to suggest the shape of beyond - now: thin and on fire.