Neurosis
- Story by Anthony Bartkewicz
- Photo by Brendan Tobin
Neurosis' vast impact on the history of extreme metal is undeniable. So is the fact that their new LP, Given to the Rising, is their heaviest album in years
In 1985, Neurosis wrote a list of six bands: Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Black Flag, Joy Division, Amebix and Rudimentary Peni. Their names are monolithic. They’re all responsible for entire genres and subgenres. These were the bands that mattered to Neurosis, as much in their singular visions and all-encompassing aesthetics as their music.
“They seemed like things that were borne of an immense truth,” Scott Kelly says. “They set themselves apart by their methods of getting themselves to a place where they were creating alone. The early Pink Floyd stuff was just so deep. We had a videotape of Live at Pompeii early on, and I remember watching that and getting a deeper feeling for where they were artistically. Joy Division was so real, with so much heart, and the music was very different and minimal. Black Flag were so vicious and totally willing to do their own thing and thrive on the backlash. Rudimentary Peni and Amebix were kind of our hidden things—most people still don’t know about those bands, unfortunately. [Rudimentary Peni’s LP] Death Church, all that stuff still really rings true in our music and in our approach. Those bands are still there, every one of them.”
It’s pretty easy to connect that depth and truth to the drug casualties, fucked-up band relations, madness and suicide in that list. You can’t fuck with the infinite, stare into the abyss, etc. Neurosis, on the other hand, seem to be doing pretty OK. They’ve got side projects, a record label, and as much respect as any band around, along with a huge and obvious influence on virtually everyone who plays heavy nowadays. Like the bands on their list, Neurosis matter. They seem to operate with a sense of strength and honor that goes beyond the usual XbrotherhoodX/STRENGTH BEYOND STRENGTH!/being Henry Rollins ways that underground music has expressed those things, towards something more archetypal. Both Kelly and Steve Von Till talk about music—their own and others’—like it’s religious in and of itself. It’s honestly a little unnerving at first; not being a praying man, talking about spirituality and paths to enlightenment is kind of awkward even when it isn’t THE GUYS FROM NEUROSIS. Eventually, it becomes pretty appealing. If you’re going to go so far as to say an album changed your life, why not just go all the way with it?
“We needed total commitment,” Kelly says. “We needed to create a family. We felt a lot of power from those bands, and we were all those kids who needed bands to get us through. That was also something that was at the foundation of what we wanted to do: If people wanted it and if it meant something to them, that it would be there for them—we would put everything that we had into it.”
In the past decade, after years of touring and earlier, more hardcore-influenced albums like Pain of Mind and The Word as Law, Neurosis—Kelly and Von Till, bassist Dave Edwardson, drummer Jason Roeder, keyboardist Noah Landis and Josh Graham on live visuals—have gone beyond “cult band” status to being their own sect, if not an entire religion. They’re whispered about reverently, and now make infrequent live appearances before the believers. Through those early tours, Kelly recalls the band was “still feeling out who we were, just doing it.”
“Once we got into that mode of touring, we had a pretty massive emergence happening near the end of The Word as Law,” he says. “The last couple of songs were wrote for that album, we were really wanting for another guitar or keyboards, and we made that decision pretty much as we were mixing The Word as Law, to implement the next phase—which, honestly, we had talked about and conceived right at the beginning… we just didn’t play well enough at the time. So when we reached that point, we immediately jumped at that.”
“Getting Darwinian with our own sound,” Steve Von Till calls it, “and more spiritual. Adding the keyboards and the samples and always attacking our own weaknesses. [Spirituality] was always there, but it was a little less clarified, less open. By Enemy of the Sun, we realized that we were crafting something that was beyond even our original intent. There were responsibilities with crafting something of that nature, and we were gonna commit ourselves to it wholeheartedly. We turned into a touring machine after that point.”
“Responsibilities” sounds even more like Neurosis is part of some covenant with their listeners. “When you tap into the greater spirit that drives art and music and you come across something that you think may actually be culturally and historically significant, you have a responsibility to it,” Von Till explains. “You have a responsibility to that fire, to that creative spirit that’s driving everything. This isn’t from an ego perspective; it’s from looking at what happens afterward, when you realize what your music is doing for your own soul and your own being. And then you get confirmation from others that it’s indeed happening and it’s real. You have a duty to surrender yourself to it in order to keep it pure.”
TO CRAWL UNDER ONE'S SKIN
Relapse CEO Matt Jacobson had been a fan since Souls at Zero, but says the idea of actually signing them to Relapse, whose most popular band at the time was Amorphis, never even occurred to him. “Someone in our mailorder department said I should sign them and I laughed, like, yeah right, like that would even be possible,” he says. “Early on, Relapse was such a small entity and Neurosis was so highly regarded, it just didn’t compute that it would be a possibility.”
Through Silver in Blood, Neurosis’ Relapse debut, is one of the most apocalyptic albums ever. It’s every bit as tortured as Cacophony, as bleak as Closer and heavier than Vol. 4. The album is from a dark time the band doesn’t really talk about, but it’s the one that brought curious crust punks and hardcore kids to Relapse and put Neurosis in arenas and amphitheaters for the first time after a decade of underground touring. “All the things that happened, whether it was the Pantera tour or Ozzfest, definitely helped to bring attention to the label,” Jacobson says. “I have to hand it to Phil [Anselmo] from Pantera because he was the one who wanted [Neurosis] on there and really made it happen because he was a huge fan. It was a good opportunity to get the band out in front of a whole lot of different people, but in retrospect it’s clearer that the Pantera fanbase wasn’t the ideal fanbase for them just because the aesthetic is so incredibly different; I think it attracts a different type of person. They certainly did win some people over, though.”
Neurosis spent seven months on the road supporting Pantera before joining Ozzfest together. “The first time they asked us to do [Ozzfest] we said no,” Kelly admits. “Then we found out that Sabbath was playing and we called back like, ‘Can we please do it?’ It was kinda like going to college. We were front and center every single Sabbath set, just trying to absorb what they were. It was definitely an ulterior motive; we wanted to be in the presence of Sabbath for a prolonged period of time.”
By Times of Grace in 1999, Neurosis had established a signature, titanic sound, captured as live as possible by Steve Albini, that influenced countless heavy bands big (Isis, Mastodon) and small (a million others). If Mastodon’s Brann Dailor is Decibel’s on-call Iron Maiden fanboy, Troy Sanders can easily fill the same role for Neurosis. “I think I’ve said that Times of Grace is my favorite, but Neurosis is the only band where I play every record until every speck of sound is absorbed into my system” he says. “That’s the only band in the world that affects me like that. The depths that they explore are so brutal and personal and honest. It’s very obvious that they’re the real deal. They are it for me.”
Though the two bands have only played together once (at Relapse’s 2003 Contamination Festival in Philadelphia), Mastodon were formed shortly after Dailor and Bill Kelliher had spent a month touring Europe with Neurosis in Today Is the Day. “The first thing they said when our band got together was that after watching Neurosis live for 30 shows in a row, witnessing that concentrated power was like being schooled on the universe,” Sanders says. Scott Kelly has contributed vocals and lyrics to two of Mastodon’s songs and performed them live with the band when scheduling permitted. “That’s a religious moment for us onstage,” Sanders says, echoing the way Kelly and Von Till talk about Sabbath (and everything else). “We just close our eyes and absorb the experience. It becomes religious in that moment.”
FROM WHERE ITS ROOTS RUN
Now, “Neur-Isis” and “metalgaze” have entered metal vernacular as convenient shorthand for bands that cop Neurosis’ dynamics—some with little awareness of the source. “We run a record label so we don’t live in a cave; we get a lot of magazines, and we started to see our name used almost like an adjective in people’s reviews of stuff,” Von Till says. “It’s hard to imagine because the way I would hope we would be inspiring to people is in the same way those bands that we first talked about were inspiring to us. You don’t hear those bands in us. Maybe in a very abstracted way, but you get the vibe. Unfortunately, in music right now… I’m not saying that this happens with us necessarily and I would never name names, but there’s a lot of imitation. The majority of the stuff that people latch onto and talk about are part of these whole clique-y movements, these scenes of bands that sound like each other, and I hope we haven’t had any part of inspiring anything like that. To me that violates that whole ethic we come from.”
“Musically speaking, their impact has been pretty vast and some of the bands are more blatant than others,” Jacobson says diplomatically. “It’s also intriguing to see how things change in the music scene. A band like Isis had some Neurosis influence early on, and now there are a lot of bands that have an Isis influence. It’s interesting to trace that back, because I’ve found some of these younger bands don’t even know who Neurosis is because they’re new jacks. There’s kind of a scene or an aesthetic developed out of what Neurosis were doing, and that splinters and grows in a lot of different directions, so much so that it’s hardly related anymore. There are certainly some bands that have adopted some elements of the Neurosis aesthetic and have done it very well. The new record is going to be very interesting, because it’s a heavier record than they’ve done in recent times. Some bands were doing the heavier end of the Neurosis thing and it was kind of OK because Neurosis weren’t playing that style anymore. So that’ll be interesting to see.”
Yes, Given to the Rising—released in May through Neurot—is heavy. While “this album is definitely heavier” is as obligatory in a metal interview as “we don’t fit into any category,” it means something when you’re talking about Neurosis. A Sun That Never Sets and The Eye of Every Storm, while still intense, lacked the full-bore brutality of Silver and Grace. Rising, for no reason Kelly or Von Till can give, is Neurosis heavy. “It kind of surprised all of us that it came through really aggressively. More aggressive than anything we’ve written in probably 10 years or so. At the same time, it’s got a lot of fucked-up qualities of things we’d come to on the last two records,” says Kelly. “What we tend to do when we’re writing is reflect back on where we were before and what we felt good about, what we didn’t feel good about. The things we don’t feel good about are usually things where we stepped into it a little lightly. That was one of the reasons we went ahead and put some more melodic singing on the records. We had these parts where we kinda half-assed in singing them. With this record, we just all felt like smashing shit. There’s no real rhyme or reason to how we came around to it. It’s about an hour and 10 minutes of repeated blows to the head. It felt really clean, like, this is definitely where we’re at right now, how we’re feeling. I didn’t know, after doing The Eye of Every Storm, that that’s where we’d be two years later. But it was, and it is.”
Von Till bristles a little at the idea that Given to the Rising represents a return to their darkest and heaviest period (to be fair, “early-period brutality” is right in the press release). “To me it’s not in any way some sort of throwback to an earlier style” he says. “If anything, it takes what we were doing on The Eye of Every Storm—attacking our weaknesses of not using enough melody, trying to craft things that have that same trance-inducing, introspective, dark, disturbing space with melody and texture. Taking a step away from riff-oriented music and just really learning to sculpt our tone and not necessarily looking at what everyone is playing, just having it all meld together to create a mood. Over time we kind of perfected that, it’s just that on [Storm] it was more of a lush, psychedelic, melodic mood. This one’s equally textural; it doesn’t really rely on the type of riffs you’d associate with our past aggressive records. When we were writing this, we were laughing at how mean it was. Because we’re still concentrating on that sonic evolution from that last record, it’s done with texture. There are notes that aren’t really there, the notes are happening because of what everyone’s doing and the way it blends together. It’s taking that textural element and turning it into something extremely oppressive, claustrophobic, dark and ugly, as opposed to the last one, which might have been a little bit more rich and beautiful. This one really shed that and went after the dark bits. It’s always based on where we’ve been before. It’s always a step away from the last place.”
If Neurosis are a religion, or part of a bigger religion, then speaking to Kelly and Von Till is sort of like getting an audience with the Pope. You want to ask big questions. So I ask both if there’s an ultimate goal to Neurosis. “That’s the point at which words probably betray the true intent,” Von Till offers, “but I’ll give it a go: sonic exploration, spiritual dedication, and purity and originality of heart.”
“The ultimate goal of Neurosis is to leave behind a legacy,” Kelly says without hesitation. “To leave behind a significant mark on whatever’s left of the world when we’re gone. That’s it. This band will continue until one or all of us are in the grave, and at that point it’ll stop. That’s been the deal since the beginning. The music will keep coming until it doesn’t.”
