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Band: Combative Alignment Album: …And Outside Glows The Red Dawn Label: Malignant Records Genre(s): Dark Ambient, Drone Website: www.malignantrecords.com
Rating: 5/10 Track Listing: 1. Part One 2. Part Two 3. Part Three 4. Part Four 5. Part Five 6. Part Six
Before we begin, this is a dark ambient/drone album. If that’s not your thing, don’t bother reading. This album is not going to miraculously turn you onto the genre. That being said, we have a pretty standard release from dark ambient duo Combative Alignment. The album has decent packaging; at first I was intrigued by the very professional digipak case, but upon looking inside the thing I was greeted with only a barren green panel with a few bits of writing and the names of the band members. The seemingly random words/quotes don’t seem to have anything to do with anything, and the tracks are simply and boringly titled “part one” through “part six”. I suppose this is all an attempt at being minimalist, but I find that it only serves to induce boredom and it causes me to wonder why I should spend money to buy this, knowing that the casing is so void of enticing sentiment. Anyway, the aesthetics aside, the music isn’t too bad, but it’s not particularly impressive. Combative Alignment provides a pretty straight forward semi-progressive, semi-tribal dark ambient album. That may sound kind of strange, but listen to the album and you will understand what I mean. The album doesn’t try to break new ground or take the genre somewhere new, instead it simply provides a solid piece of typical dark ambient. You’ve heard and felt all the sounds and textures here before, probably in a thinner, weaker and more lackluster manner, but you’ve heard them nonetheless. The atmosphere is the same as just about every dark ambient album ever, thick slow moving organic darkness with just a hint of ancient tribal ritualism. The tribal aspect is very underdeveloped, which is unfortunate, as the tribal element consists of only some simple and repetitive drum loops, which are mixed in nicely, but they never succeed in building a true tribal feel for the music. The album opens up as a huge menacing wall of darkness, and basically stays there for the entire 47 minutes. There is constantly a deep bass-y droning blackness that overshadows the entire album, and makes everything else in the mix virtually inaudible. This works to create and build a creepy atmosphere, but that is about all it succeeds in, and it loses its appeal after the first track or so. The album progresses slightly, but only over a very long and tedious period. The sound gives the illusion of building and progressing, but it never gets away from the same sound/texture/feeling/mood/etc. By the time you get to “part five”, it still feels as if you’re listening to “part one”. The music has changed slightly, but you’re still in the same place that you started in. Things sort of come up, but they never really have the power or volume to genuinely establish themselves, and they quickly drift off before ever taking the music somewhere new. Only around halfway through the very last track does something new come in which is very different from the monotonous fog that you’ve been hearing for the last forty or so minutes, but even that is overly simple and repetitive and fails to really force the music into a new direction. There are a couple of samples thrown in, but they fail to catch my attention or to add a significant or meaningful element to the music. The bottom line is, Combative Alignment provide a solid, albeit very typical and boring, dark ambient brew on “And Outside Glows the Red Dawn”. The album starts off well, but never succeeds in traveling anywhere, instead it sounds as though the listener is continuously entering the same gaping chasm for 47 mintues straight, with random instances of very quiet and very simple tribal drum loops. If you like the idea of sitting in a very dense fog in the mouth of a cave for a long period of time, then please pick this album up. Otherwise don’t feel bad about passing it up. Hopefully in the future Combative Alignment will work on music that fully meshes vivid tribal and organic dark ambient textures (or even other styles), and something that moves forward over time rather than retracing its steps a hundred times before ending.
-[.d4n b4rr3tt.]
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