Noctiluca, at first listen, is more like Sleepwalking Sailors than it is Night Terror or Stillicide–more of a gradual pummeling than a carpet-bombing. It’s a reminder that Helms Alee is more versatile than most bands, a reinforcement of the idea that, despite the band’s unabashed heaviness and facility with metallic screams and grit, they are, at their heart, a melodic rock band.
I’ve never had much of a preference when it comes to this band–even on NT, they balanced searing, roaring shards of metal like “Left Handy Man Handle/A New Roll” with churning slow-burners like “Rogue’s Yarn”–I’ve always been excited to hear what they do next, because I’ve never been able to predict it. The layers of melody are most surprising, swelling to a crescendo on tracks like “Illegal Guardian” and going into weird, psychedelic perpendiculars on “Pleasure Torture.”
I still feel like the band’s most potent weapon–Ben Verellen’s burly, overdriven roar–has been treated more like a secret weapon as their catalog unfurls over the years. Even he seems to be scaling back its use, deploying it only when absolutely necessary in favor of a deceptively vulnerable croon often as part of the multitracked chorus he, Dana, and Hozoji employ to considerable extent and effect on this album. This emphasis on cleaner tones adds an orchestral, cinematic flavor to Noctiluca‘s songs; a few tracks are so (for lack of a better word) clean that they feel more like post-REM melodic rock than a band known as much for their crushing amplification as they are their own brilliant musical talent.
The album’s closer, “Word Problems,” takes the cinematic feel even higher, merging the lushness with a familiar, almost throwback brutality that takes everything that makes the band my favorite–Ben’s burliness, Dana’s smoothness, and Hozoji’s incandescence–and smashes it all together like kids playing with action figures. It’s the perfect climax, the moment when the band takes everything they’ve been experimenting with and reminds you that they are, at the end of the day, still the heavy behemoth you know and love them as.
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