(2023) worriedaboutsatan - The Pivot    


Review:
While its title might intimate a dramatic change in direction, the thirteenth worriedaboutsatan studio album stays the course with more of the project's signature dark ambient, electronic adventurousness, and powerful post-rock. Much more, in fact: at fifty-six minutes, The Pivot is the longest worriedaboutsatan release in some time. Anyone interested in hearing how the group sounds in its Gavin Miller iteration (in earlier days Thomas Ragsdale partnered with Miller) need look no further. An alternate title for the release could have been The Sprawl, considering how much ground is covered in its fourteen tracks. It is, nevertheless, as its prolific creator declares, “a very satan album.” The panoramic sweep of the pulsating, sequencer-driven overture, “The Tracks Go Off in This Direction,” shows the worriedaboutsatan persona has lost none of its ominous edge or blistering drive. There's ear candy aplenty on the album, be it samples of voices threaded into the arrangements or a flirtation with Boards of Canada-styled warble (“Memory Lane Has A Lot To Answer For”), and surprises, too. I wasn't expecting Miler to serve up a straight-up kosmische exercise, but that's exactly what happens in “Oh, It's You. What Do You Want?,” a blazing workout that could have been called “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” had Pink Floyd not nabbed the title already. Meanwhile, the seething industrial-electronica of “Tell It to the Mountain” points the release in the direction of outfits like Coil and Bauhaus. Miller smartly offsets aggressive numbers with calmer meditations like the pretty “Petité Melodie,” epic “Shipley Lanes,” and sombre “Ice Cold Water,” the latter including fond spoken word recollections of a father who died in the Bosnian war. Smothered in atmosphere and texture, some tracks are quintessential worriedaboutsatan, “Stop the Car,” “All These Worlds Are Yours,” and “Written Threats on Endless Walls” among them. A few guests appear, including violinist Sophie Green, but The Pivot is otherwise Miller operating alone and once again demonstrating an inexhaustible capacity for creating tracks of imagination and originality. That he's able to consistently produce material of such high quality in such abundance is remarkable. — textura.org


   


Track List:
01 - The Tracks Go Off in This Direction
02 - Dave & Cowboy
03 - Oh, It's You. What Do You Want
04 - Petité Melodie
05 - Tell It to the Mountain
06 - Warp Xrive
07 - Stop the Car
08 - Shall We Try That Again
09 - Ice Cold Water
10 - Inertia
11 - All These Worlds Are Yours
12 - Written Threats On Endless Walls
13 - Memory Lane Has a Lot to Answer For
14 - Shipley Lanes


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, electronic
Country: Bradford, UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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