Thomas Bel - To Dye Every Night MP3 FLAC

How much can one phrase express. In the lexicon of conversation's myriad possibilities just how much can you infer or intone from a few words or, in this case, notes. This is what Thomas Bel is endeavoring to answer for us and he does so in a very elegant manner. The artwork for his release shows a desolate, abandoned back country road which is framed by a blurred treeline and then underpinned with a series of weathered tire tracks. It is as though he's brought us to this place in order to say that this is where everything leads. The decisions, the minute alterations in the course of one's life will bring you to this place... but what is this place?

It is a realm of introspection, a landscape unaltered by the designs and whims of marketers and ad men. An environment wrought out of the tough, sinewy fibers which make up a person's character. Now I mulled Bel's newest over for some time, quite a lot longer than I expected. People may say, hey its only one track. Oh, but what a track it is. Equal parts Kubrick and concrete. Imagine the opening montages of 2001 set to this and you'll begin to understand just how much range and muscular grace is to be found when you play this. The one, and I do mean one thing to remember when you're listening to To Dye Every Night is that unfortunately it does come to an end.

The first few times I let it out to play, this one pushed me out of the room. It is hard to convey in mere words but there's a confrontational centerpiece to what he's composed here which is in some way quite subconsciously disturbing. If one must try to connect things to what they have heard before so that madness does not ensue then here is the only attachment I could find. Coil's Astral Disaster album is in the barest sense all that I've come across previously that could hold its own against the tsunami-like onslaught of Thomas Bel. There's just something in the ebbs and flows of his work which really feels enveloping and gives you a sense that the torch has been passed.

Maybe I'm just a bit touched myself to see this sort of interwoven mosaic and I hope he appreciates the mention but his own material is ghostly, gaunt and wildly lush all at the same time. You go into this picking at barbs of melody yet by the time you've crossed the 33 minute mark, everything has melded together into an organic composite of multiple levels which sing and scream in equal measure. It is as though a concerto has been fashioned out of absolute nothingness. Stunning.