The Angelic Porcess - “Weighing Souls With Sand” Review
The Angelic Process. Weighing Souls With Sand. 2007. 3.5 stars.
Before disbanding at the end of 2007, Georgia’s The Angelic Process crafted this final epic, merging ambient and metal styles into a grand and mournful vision. Weighing Souls With Sand is best described as a massive wall of sound, reverberating with druggy shoegazing riffs and martial drumming, playing in the same league as post-metal bands like Jesu and newcomers Have a Nice Life.
While those other acts punctuate their sound with punk or industrial touches, The Angelic Process pushes more towards dark ambiance and experimentation, creating long emotive tracks that slowly unfold into fuzzed out and noisy climaxes, immersing you in their hazy atmosphere. Weighing Souls With Sand is a majestic accomplishment, with its hypnotic drones, ethereal and distant vocals and the sheer depth of its sound, the transcendental aspirations of the band are immediately fulfilled.
The only major criticism I can throw at this album is that the band far more concentrated on atmosphere than producing distinctive song structures, letting all the tracks bleed into each other with little variation between them. Whereas Jesu for instance will add to the variety on their releases by emphasizing different melodic elements, tones and vocal styles, The Angelic Process seem entranced by their own beauty and can’t avoid the sameness that falls across this otherwise fantastic record. However, if Weighing Souls is taken as a cohesive and psychedelic sonic experiment, rather than a collection of songs, than the listener is sure to find the whole experience rewarding. While the band is no longer creating music, as an unfortunate injury has left the guitarist unable to play fully, this release is a satisfying summation of an interesting trend in underground metal.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:26 am
[…] of Earth and Sunn O))), their cacophonous guitar work also follows a shoegazing torrent akin to The Angelic Process . Naming off influences and contemporaries is a suitable way of describing The Gault’s sound, […]
July 6th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
As a member of the family, I regret to inform the fans that K.Angylus, guitarist for The Angelic Process, took his life on April 26, 2008. Let us quickly dispel the myth that he got lost in his own dark compositions. He died of lost love and chronic depression. There are no plans to re-release any of the cd’s, so if you have one from the band, you have a collector’s item. K.’s widow has been too devastated to publish any press releases, but I feel that we have a responsibility to K.’s fans. The body was cremated and the ashes scattered at Tybee Island, GA, USA, near where K. attended art college.