Scott Kelly - The Wake

Taking fellow Neurosis member Steve Von Till’s lead, Scott Kelly deconstructs his day job’s collapsing (new) buildings sound down to just voice and acoustic guitar. But whereas Von Till’s efforts were spiritual scavenging into the catastrophic aftermath of Neurosis’s sonic wrecking ball, The Wake is wholly less satisfactory. Instead of the soulful nihilism inherent in Von Till's release, The Wake at best sounds like nondescript trance music. Kelly seems rather uncomfortably naked without the armour of monolithic distortion and relies instead on the huskiness of his voice, which seems, to anyone with even a cursory hearing of Tom Waits or Michael Gira, overly forced. Seemingly inspired by lost love trauma, the lyrics draw upon that consistently self-unaware angst while his metaphors and imagery fall pretty flat without that catastrophic bombast. Neurosis have always had the potential to be silly and bland – and here it is laid utterly bare. [Ali Maloney]