Weird, oppressive and quite frankly cosmic The Blight have refined something truly unusual and wonderfully powerful with their new record, Meditations On Insignificance. A record that eschews traditional song structures and instead pushes for bold new heights The Blight take you on a galactic journey, guiding you step by step through ethereal soundscapes and crushing bouts of harsh noise. Not a traditional band in any sense of the word, this project relies on eerie pedals and powerful loops to create something wonderfully organic. The planetary theme meanwhile only seems to add to the power of the music. The way that Meditations On Insignificance seems to want to wind its way into your psyche and make you choke on the crippling realities presented within reminds us time and time again that though it might be an inaccessible genre, noise has a unique predilection for speaking to the human condition and reminding us why we delve deep into these dark underground caverns in the first place.
I think the beauty of Meditations On Insignificance is the joy with which it subverts expectations, even within the traditionally very subversive noise genre. Rather than trying to create claustrophobic sounds that batter the listener into oblivion, The Blight seek to do the exact opposite, conjuring up monochromatic soundscapes which are simply massive and hint at a much larger and more nihilistic world. It's the sound of all of us reaching out and realizing that there is nothing, that no matter what we do everything is meaningless and that we need to struggle with these realities for our entire lives. Even the more focused parts of the record, like the black metal tinted opening track "Self" still hint at this oppression by expansion. The journey of Meditations On Insignificance is actually documented in the song titles, with the most narrow sounding tracks coming first and the broadest and most fundamentally disturbing closing out the record. The track titles, beginning with "Self" and ending in "Galaxy" similarly describe an expanding perspective, meaning that by the time you get to the end you are choking on a uniquely twisted composition.
At the end of the day the colossal sound worlds and terrifying realities painted by The Blight can't help but to entrance the listener. Meditations On Insignificance roars forward with a sense of nihilistic majesty that very few of the bands peers can really compare too. It's rare that a record can have this sort of scope, a scope that makes you question your very hold on the world, but The Blight pull it off with aplomb. The way that they ease you into the darkest and most horrifying sides of their music can't help but to stun and the perverse majesty of their compositions is inherently fascinating. It's a record that those who are already invested in the noise scene are going to come back to again and again and those who don't get it will simply be put off by. Investing an inherently demented music with new meaning, Meditations On Insignificance is a minor masterpiece.
Score: 8.5/10
