It's a long way from West Flanders, Belgium, where doom/drone/sludge outfit Amenra reside, to San Francisco, U.S.A., wherein is based their new label home, Neurot Recordings, but, as 2012's Mass V quickly reveals, mere degrees separate all parties involved where music is concerned. That's not to overstate the influence of Neurot bosses and post-metal architects Neurosis upon Amenra's compositions -- nor ignore it -- but one certainly need not have expert ears to recognize the common ground shared by the two. All four of Mass V's lengthy sonic excursions, and especially bookends "Boden" and "Nowena | 9.10," follow the general Neurosis m.o. of contrasting minimal and maximal extremes with bone-jarring abruptness, and the hysterical primal screams raging above it all -- if not the alternating gentler voices -- certainly hark back to Neurosis' angry young men days, but that's not to disparage Amenra's own ability to sculpt captivating art out of these common ingredients. After all, not just anyone can construct a slow-building/crumbling/rebuilding epic like the 13-minute "A Mon Âme" and make it stick to errant attention spans -- never mind find ways to insert mesmeric chants within the larger body of a piece like "Dearborn and Buried" without losing its vital role within the entire piece. So what if the Bay Area veterans looked halfway round the globe and possibly saw a younger version of themselves in these Belgian upstarts? Inspiration and imitation are two very different things, and either one can easily be cured and/or justified by undeniably contagious musical explorations like those Amenra have conjured up for Mass V.
© Eduardo Rivadavia /TiVo