For a band that has always cultivated a unique and idiosyncratic sound, New Age Doom appears to have fully mastered their craft on Angels Against Angels. The album demonstrates a confident command of arrangement and atmosphere, tactically marshalling diverse musical elements while seamlessly integrating multiple genres. At the same time, it advances a spiritual message rooted in equality, love and truth.
Sparkling with elements of jazz, experimental, electronic, progressive rock and dub, the record is elevated further by the unmistakable vocals and lyricism of H.R. (Human Rights), frontman of the legendary band Bad Brains. Angels Against Angels uproots disparate sonic textures and intricately fuses them with both playfulness and precision. By challenging conventional notions of what “spiritual music” should sound like, New Age Doom, alongside H.R., blend metal, hardcore, punk and reggae into a cohesive unit.
Historically, New Age Doom has built an expansive discography shaped by a wide array of collaborators, including Andy Morin of Death Grips and Pussy Riot member Alina Petrova on electric violin. For their latest album, several musicians have returned to the fold: Tim Lefebvre on electric guitar, trumpeter Dan Rosenboom, saxophonist Gavin Templeton, drummer Benedicte Pierleoni, DJ CrookOne, and Cola Wars on keyboards. Though each musician brings a distinct sensibility, together they harmonise into a fluid collective, sculpting a multifaceted album invigorated by its dynamic sound.
Angels Against Angels opens with an immediate launch from pensive to punk in ‘Life On The Other Side’. Plunging into slow-motion guitar riffs, the beat percolates with increasing severity before the track exhausts itself halfway through, slows down again, and expands into a space where the rock elements echo and shimmer, in a seemingly endless firmament.
‘We’re All The Same’ opens with a spinning kaleidoscope of gurgling, retrofuturistic sounds that evoke the feeling of travel within a vast cosmos. A percolating, steady beat is superimposed over the backdrop of a violin, and H.R. vocalising mantra-like while we glide through the cosmos.
Taken in its entirety, the album resembles a carefully assembled mosaic, or a patchwork quilt, of contrasting fragments bound together by recurring elements that serve as a unifying thread. Much like a film score that revisits familiar motifs to guide the listener back to its centre, there are shared elements within some songs that feel like recollections of the others. Lyrically, the album embodies chaos and hope, and the landscape it explores parallels the two extremes, which sharpen each other by contrast, ultimately resolving to find a balance between them.
At times reaching points of hectoring desperation (as in the end of ‘Life On The Other Side pT. 2’ and ‘Angels Vs. Angels’) the music also drifts into spacey, weightless suspension (‘Radio On’, ‘We’re All The Same’). The album manages to marry at the midpoint each extremity. In the end, as a listener, your desires for slowness and rapidity are both satiated. Nothing here follows a pattern. Everything feels spontaneous, and doesn’t follow a trajectory you could anticipate from its previous movements. Angels Against Angels is an album that keeps you on your toes.
