(2021) Only Now and Beneath the Ruins - Anamnesis



Review:
Sometimes it feels like the whole “cyberpunk” thing really petered out before its time. Perhaps it just got too diluted and self-contradictory, or just plain corny, like regular punk. Still, maybe the solution was not to doff it, but to get even more granular and really make a go of it across genres and lifestyles: cyberhippie, cybermetal, cyberzydeco? The possibilities are truly limitless.Had we careened down that slippery slope, this collaboration between guitarist Beneath the Ruins (Peter Arensdorf, also of doom-rock band King Woman) and electronic producer Only Now (Kush Arora) would be either “Cyberamerican Primitive” or “Cyberspaghetti Western”. There are shades of Fahey and Morricone, Reznor and Lustmord; mostly, though, the stink of Earth is all over this project, perhaps most recalling Dylan Carlson’s 2017 collaboration with The Bug, Concrete Desert. It shares with that album a layer of (cyber)alienation akin to what Kevin Martin brought to those proceedings, though it doesn’t feel quite as cohesive in its mixture. Not to write it off, mind. Arensdorf brings some sturdy desert-fried riffage to the table here, the kind of shit that feels good when you play it loud under the hot sun. The album hits its best stride when he leans into these heavy, doomy melodies, but that isn’t all the album does. ‘Ghost Town Drift’ is a cool, subdued little nugget of molasses-creep tension that brings Arora more to the foreground. The pairing of Arora’s cold digital sheen and the radiant heat of Arensdorf’s guitar can be a strange, off-putting juxtaposition at times. On the best tracks, like opener ‘Showdown’, it pays off in primal, cinematic oomph. Some of the more restrained passages, though, feel cinematic in a less flattering sense, like maybe they could serve as a backdrop for the “romantic” scenes in a late ’80s action movie.



Tracklist:
01 - Showdown
02 - Destiny
03 - Tomb Sweeper
04 - Mine of Memories
05 - Ghost Town Drift
06 - Temple of Regret
07 - Illusion


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, post-rock
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits