With how much overlap there is between the fan bases of shoegaze, post-rock, and doom metal, it's incredible that the sounds of these genres tend to be so strictly defined against each other. They are almost like siblings, sonically speaking, representing three areas of music which are molded by a reliance on heavy, hazy atmosphere, excessive volume, fluctuating structures, layered textures, and often, engaged, propulsive percussive elements- yet they're rarely invited to the same festivals, fiestas, and family functions. Maybe it's because they share so much in common, or maybe it's because they don't share enough. Regardless, you'd have to be some kind of a bold freak to actually want to cross-pollinate the three and hope to maintain any semblance of order in the household. The musical collective Lanayah is just that kind of bold, though. Heck, you could even call them brazen! Closing in on only a few years shy of a decade into their career, their latest LP (and third overall), I'm Picking Lights in a Field..., is habitually unpredictable in its moment-to-moment transitions, while exhibiting a prevailing coherence that is attributable to more than it simply having been conceived of, and recorded as, one, long track. Not only does each song tie together like some kind of grotesque, trauma-bound quilt, or a brutalized, localized reenactment of Hands Across America, but the repetition which binds its flesh to its bones through a litany of softSPINNYsoft, AGONYreliefAGONY, and calmPEALINGcalm variations, exhibits a violent recursive nature that seems to deny itself serenity even in its affirmations. The record probes unsettled baths of tension and engages in uproarious bouts of ready-fire, hardcore aggression, only to slide perceptively but unobtrusively into murky tides of tranquil creeping ecstasy, revealing in a balance of hurried turmoil and blasé transcendence that intersects with the bored absurdity of life in the same way a paintball traverses the cross-hatches of a screen door, that is, in a brilliant, richly-hued chaos-cloud. It's proof that you don't have to pick and choose between the things that breathe life into your world, choose one way to feel, or even work within one set of rules, provided you can sheer, sew, and embroider all the things that inspire you into a monstrosity whose unorthodox physiognomy is almost too fascinating for words.
* Spring Colors Challenge is a little thing I am doing where I write a fresh album review every day of the month of March inspired by a different color. Today's color, peridot, has some what of an ambiguous profile. It's not quite green, and it's not quite yellow, it's clear but kind of murky at the same time. Kind of like slime, a primordial substance that contains all the essence of life, but none of it in exacting or easily discernable quantities, sort of like a certain band whose music could be classified as shoegaze, post-rock, hardcore, or doom metal, while not being definitively any of those things to the exclusion of the others.
