Neraterrae’s Scenes from the Sublime lives up to its name, but it also projects precise direction, swinging from hopelessness to an uplifting, paved pinnacle placed well beyond its celled confines.
To be exact, the album’s selections bounce between and among its varied ingredients, the culmination presenting a no-nonsense gruffness, despite its dreamy, chemical scopes.
“The Last Abjurer” commences the album, implying a ship dispatching for a blasphemous voyage (gliding as if upon a sea of sleet), while carving niches for other careening concepts to inhabit.
These tracks include the gritty “Doorway to the I” (inspired by Zdzislaw Beksinski’s post-apocalyptic imagery) and the calamitous “Collapse of Matter and Time" (inspired by Dali’s The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory), each bursting of pure, Mad Maxian rage. “The Unfathomable Lives Again” (inspired by Johann Heinrich Fussli's The Nightmare and lithophoned by Yann Hagimont) bounces off the latter selections with hefty, horror-jangled intonations.
“Deafening Silence” (based on Ilja Yefimovich Repins' Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan) and “Fate Unveiled” (culled from Hieronymus Bosch's Visions of the Hereafter) reveal sandwiched periods of
defeat or more precisely, mollifying moments among rough rubble. “Passion Domain” (inspired
by Caspar David Heinrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog) is a smoother foundation of the same scheme, as is the inquisitive “Towards Onieric Truths” (inspired by Arnold Bocklin's The Isle of the Dead), which works as a horned-tinged
anthem for a Viking’s lame death.
“Thou, Daemon" (triggered by Francis Goya's The Exorcism and vocalized by Hagimont and Geroge Zafiriadis) is more
spiritual in its blanketing defeat: an essential church cleansing, for all intents and purposes, thus countering to the album's opening track.
However, “Virtues of Dawn” (a composition that insinuates Joseph Mallard William Turner's Light and Color {Johann Wolfgang Goethe's theory on such}and the Book of Genesis, per Moses) is more secure in its focus, pressing a “let my people go” defiance, which turns Neraterrae’s goal full circle.
Scenes of the Sublime is a remarkable epic that will
haunt one’s reveries, whether during rest or wakefulness. It proves that there's
light at the end of the proverbial tunnel and that all of life's petulant padding prevails for good, cosmic cause.
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