This is the second album from UK post-metal band The Salt Pale Collective.
Bringing together doom, sludge, post-rock, and post-metal components into a bleakly compelling whole, The Salt Pale Collective are quite the proposition. Across 35 minutes, …And God Said Nothing channels six nightmare states, each working both together and individually to end the world.
The Salt Pale Collective have a sound that’s at once brutal and nuanced. Guttural growls and envenomed distortion sit alongside epic choral enhancements, an abyssal hymn flavoured by the spectral tears of sadness and woe. The heaviness is shaded by layers of feeling and texture, with the atmospheric aspects of their sound firmly embedded. If the less heavy moments or the mood-rich elements are allowed space on their own to breathe or to otherwise to come to the fore, then this is only to heighten the sheer unyielding apocalyptic weight that continually drops down on you during these six tracks.
There’s a lot of really heavy stuff here, tastefully augmented by expressive detailing that elevates the whole. It’s tense and harsh, and is focused on oppressive atmosphere, delivering songs that crush you down both physically and emotionally. The point of it all is to remove all hope, all sense of anything good ever happening. Even the shades of light and colour that infect the record exist to merely worsen the feelings of despondent anguish and pain that the music is imbued with.
An abysmal darkness shrouds …And God Said Nothing utterly, a harrowing tsunami of dread that moves inexorably closer second by second. Brutality and violence lurk within its depths, somehow both preceding the cataclysmic waves and not, to the extent that the listener does not know which they will succumb too first.
There’s a terrifying mix of bonebreaking ugliness and spacious atmosphere on this record that’s remarkable. The music fully emphasises this duality, frequently existing in a superposition of gloomy heaviness and uplifting atmosphere. Unfortunately though for lovers of the light, the latter is strangled as it tries to soar, and dragged screaming into the depths of the uncaring voids.
…And God Said Nothing gives the strong impression that The Salt Pale Collective know something nobody else does. Whatever it is, it doesn’t bode well for everybody else. As multifaceted and shaded as …And God Said Nothing actually is, make no mistake; this is the sound of civilisations withering on the vine.
Essential listening. An absolute must for fans of acts such as Amenra, Cult of Luna, Dimscûa, Neurosis, The Ocean, Múr, and Void of Light.
Wonderbox Metal 