People really want Stuart Dahlquist to stay doom. Breathe doom, sweat doom, shit doom. Every new album the guy puts out seems to be largely greeted with "THIS is what's keeping Burning Witch from getting back together?" [answer: no. It's not] Asva has been his most challenging project to date, simply because it's not so much a doom metal band that threads off into other sounds as it is a genre-less collective that happens to sporadically utilize doom elements. Presences of Absences does little to satiate the pigeon-holers.
2008's What You Don't Know Is Frontier maintained an at least tenuous connection with doom, in that structurally it wasn't metal but there was very nearly always something heavy going on. In the present case that thread has been severed and it's now sink or swim time for Asva. Fortunately, this incarnation succeeds masterfully, like Peter Sellers' Chauncey testing the water with the end of his umbrella and then proceeding to just walk right out upon it.
I'm not sure where I get a sense of aquatic imagery from this. It may be a carry over from WYDKIF, where not only was there a song entitled "Christopher Columbus", but "A Game in Hell, Hard Work in Heaven" came on for me with the dreadful, long gestating horror of a ship lost at sea (I would later stumble across an absolutely phenomenal animated video which seemed to confirm the nautical imagery). More likely, though, it's the baptismal aura that Presences exudes, an expunging of sin and subsequent rebirth into a world that itself has yet to be saved… and arguably doesn't want to be.
I used the term "collective" rather than "group" earlier to describe Asva, and that was no accident: Dahlquist is the captain of this vessel, but the crew refreshes with every port. Here we have the talents of Toby Driver (Maudlin of the Well, Kayo Dot) on vocals and guitar; Greg Gilmore (Mother Love Bone, prominent Seattle session musician) on drums; and Jake Weller on trumpet. Dahlquist himself plays bass and guitar, and has stated in interviews that this was the first incarnation of Asva that was a true collaborative songwriting effort. In that case he's got a good ear for collaborators, as the individual contributions throughout are seamless. You never get the sense that anyone felt they needed to reward one another's participation with, say, a non sequitur guitar solo.
But if the only thing to be said for Presences of Absences was that it lacked the usual, expected disjointedness, that would merely be backhanded praise that doesn't truly do the effort justice. As on the previous record, emotion plays an important part here, far more important in fact than the actual compositional parameters. The genius of a piece like "A Bomb in That Suitcase" is the sheer patience involved in the build up; music based in pathos too often utilizes knee jerk rage or histrionic sentimentality to engage its audience. Dahlquist and his handpicked cohorts do an exemplary job of immersing themselves in the experience and letting the momentum ebb and flow as it will (there's that nautical imagery again).
There really is a classical grandeur to Presences of Absences, an august reconciliation between wonder and horror borne along on the otherworldy falsetto of Driver's vocals and a church organ backbone. I'm not sure what Dahlquist's intentions were thematically, but there is an almost gospel-like sense of religious reverence throughout. If What You Don't Know Is Frontier was a rotting ship, Presences of Absences is a cathedral.
10 out of 10
Presences of Absences is out now on Important Records.
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