Scottish alt/post-rock outfit Midas Fall release their Fifth studio album, ‘Cold Waves Divide Us’. Michael Hamilton joins founding members Elizabeth Heaton and Rowan Burn for the follow-up to their 2018 Prog Magazine Awards ‘Limelight Award’ winning album, ‘Evaporate’.
The album opens with `In the Morning We’ll Be Someone Else` a delightfully ethereal introduction with all sorts of sounds as if awakening or arising from inaction with some dream like vocals and a kind of eerie sense of anticipation. A tribal drumbeat leads us in and guides us through `I Am Wrong` which lyrically is about feeling trapped in a situation with someone where you feel never good enough, constantly criticised, and like you can never win. There`s soaring deep resonating electronic synth tones with vocals that are slightly introspective with a fairly sorrowful texture within their depths.
`Salt `has a quite spiritual ambience and a beating heartbeat as the number evolves. As a mineral, salt is used in a variety of rituals and ceremonies, religious and non, and is a symbol of eternal life and presentation. We have a further pulsing vibration leading us through `In This Avalanche` a moving reflective composition of companionship which becomes stunningly hypnotic.
`Point of Diminishing Return` may well refer to the concept used in the field of microeconomics but here it’s an instrumental, fragile almost ghostly listen with a feeling of yearning accentuated with what sounds like a haunting cello. In the next number `Monsters` according to Elizabeth Heaton, “The monsters I sing about in this song are the intrusive, anxiety ridden thoughts that decide to rear their ugly heads from time to time, especially when you least expect it, just to remind you that you never truly have full control. There is a feeling of defeat and submission in this song, juxtaposed with the idea that the act of writing the words and music itself can be the resolution”
`Atrophy` is to gradually decline in effectiveness or vigour due to underuse or neglect and this presentation does have a melancholic feeling of sorrow, grief or anguish as if something, maybe time, a relationship or a person is fading or leaving. Title track `Cold Waves Divide Us` has a distant tone to begin with but gathers a throbbing beat about eighty seconds in and some metrical drumming along with sweeping synth keys. A fairly spellbinding listen which kind of shifts as it develops.
`Little Wooden Boxes` is wonderfully enthralling and if i`m honest, I drifted off into thoughts of my own as the number advanced with a resonating echoey atmosphere. The album closes out with `Mute` which conjures up a silent, speechless or even uncommunicative number but this is so far from that. It`s another tense and anxious alignment that feels as if it`s holding back or controlling an inner rage, maybe the mute being the way the narrator deals with the internal turmoil.
I was really blown away with `Cold Waves Divide Us` and found myself quite overwhelmed at times at it`s stark aural beauty. There were elements of bands like Dean Can Dance, Tool, This Mortal Coil and A Perfect Circle but this outfit have their own sense of intelligence and uniqueness.
This was my introduction to the delights of Midas Fall so i`m looking forward to exploring what has predated this.
Rating 9/10
