Album Review: Neurosis - Honor Found In Decay

For their fifth consecutive record, Neurosis team up with producer Steve Albini and put an end to an excruciating five-year wait. With anticipation reaching saturation point, Honor Found In Decay is a timely arrival that translates the apocalyptic aura of the time into a poetic meditation on the cyclic processes of creativity and life.

Though the song structures are perhaps a little more straightforward, there's a certain dynamism that imbues it with less immediacy than its predecessor. Such latency, however, is a positive symptom of Neurosis in that it acts to resist illusive preconceptions by affecting a seemingly perpetual state of curiosity. Here they've once more unlocked the potential of music to act as conduit for the ineffable, and this couldn't be truer of the epic centrepiece My Heart For Deliverance – such an exquisitely twisted contrast of melody and discordancy is rarely heard. These communications are veiled in darkness, however they become frighteningly perceptible forms of commune which are all the clearer for it. This condition is alluded to in At The Well as repetitious screams of “In a shadow world” are subtly underscored by “We hide in the light”, before the final lyrical verse crashes over the top of both to form a dramatic crescendo of voices.

The primal, visceral and emotional power of Honour Found In Decay is something to be felt and known by the embodied psyche, but not something that can be reduced to stagnant resolution by the intellect. Once more Neurosis exercise their position as one of the most influential bands in heavy music history by burning the structures of stagnancy and forging another path to be found.