Though clearly part of a lineage of introspective, forward-thinking post-metal stretching back to Neurosis, Rwake never really sounded like any of their peers. On paper, the Arkansas septet’s fusion of extreme metal riffing, southern rock licks and progressive songwriting might sound similar to what Mastodon or Kylesa were doing at the same time, but whilst those bands had more of a punchy hardcore energy, Rwake were much swampier and more oppressive.
The band constantly progressed with each new record, until their last album, 2011’s appropriately titled Rest, tapered off some of the more confrontational edges of their early work to incorporate cleaner, more melodic passages, without coming at the expense of their rustic riffing heft. The esoteric flavour and folky mysticism of long-awaited comeback The Return Of Majik still comes as a surprise, however.
Opener ‘You Swore We’d Always Be Together’ feels like prime Rwake, immediately showing off the best production the band have ever had. There’s not only a more powerful wallop behind those huge sludgy riffs, but an extra depth and clarity to the melancholy licks that dance in the spaces between. But from the dreamy, lingering chords and lurching, unpredictable rhythms of the title track onwards, the album takes on an even more adventurous tone.
It’s clear the band had a lot to say after such a long break, and frontman C.T.’s aggressive stream-of-consciousness ranting lends them a perfect vehicle with which to do so (especially when backed up by Moog player Brittany’s throat-lacerating screams). It’s not exactly spoken word, but not really sung either. On the album’s emotional peak, ‘In After Reverse’, this approach is oddly reminiscent of the enthusiastically mystical delivery of David Tibet, albeit with an all-American Deep South drawl replacing his fluttering English school boy yelp.
In fact, the album’s fusion of wide-eyed psychedelic poetry and ponderous doom riffing often feels closer to Current 93’s perennially misunderstood Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain than it does any of the nihilistic sludge that informed the band’s earlier material. This newfound sense of focus and spirituality is felt throughout this record, but nowhere more so than on sprawling centre-piece ‘Distant Constellations And The Psychedelic Incarceration’, in which the mic is passed to Black Oak Arkansas’ Jim “Dandy” Mangrum, recasting the singer as some kind of ancient shamanic presence and bringing Rwake’s love of southern rock full circle in the process.
It’s a fitting metaphor for The Return Of Majik as a whole. As psychedelic and out-there as it gets, Rwake never lose sight of their roots here. This is clearly the work of the same band that turned heads all those years ago, but the additional years of experience and more adventurous sonic palette make it their most immersive record yet.
