Three piece band MAKE from Chapel Hill/NC have released their 2nd full length album The Golden Veil.
The album can roughly be labeled as post-rock with sludge, psychedelic, doom and drone influences…, roughly, because MAKE use even the typical post rock/metal elements in a way that makes them totally their own. The loud-quiet contrasts, the slow build ups and cathartic release, we all know well. MAKE drive them to unusual extremes at times and they manage to surprise within the well known patterns.
Beautiful, unhurried dreamy melodies provide a sense of abundance of time and space, often steeped in compelling psychedelia you can easily lose yourself in, but the next crushing riff will find and destroy you before you realize what just happened. All contrasts are extreme, be it the dense and the spacious, the loud and the quiet, the frail and the crushing.
Into this abundance of time and space MAKE complect different musical styles and layers of textures easily and smoothly. There are bits of spaced out psychedelia, acoustic folk, noisy ambience, drone, doom, and touches of progressive, black and death metal. All this is used in a thoughtful and unobtrusive way that this sense of abundance of space is retained. The vocals are used in the same vein, diverse in themselves, harsh and clean, but modestly dosed.
The album is best listened to in the given order of the songs. Right from its start the first song feels like an intro and there's a flow between the songs that builds an overall coherence of the intricate soundscapes that allows the nearly one hour and seven songs to evolve and expand their dark and cold, but irresistible atmospheres. And it's, most notably, MAKE's sense for creating spellbinding atmospheres that makes The Golden Veil outstanding.
The song "The Immortal" is featured on The Wicked Lady Show 94