Album review: Constants – If Tomorrow The War

So, another release from new-to-me label Science Of Silence; I’m always on the look-out (or rather on the listen-out, I suppose) for new sources of post-metal and experimental heavy music, and this vinyl-plus-digital outfit claim that as their main stomping ground. Jolly good, then; If Tomorrow The War is the second album from Constants, whom I have heretofore never heard of, but I can say with confidence that I bet they never sounded quite like this before… because Science Of Silence got Justin “Godflesh/Jesu” Broadrick in to do the production job on this one.

And Oh-Em-fuckin’-Gee, there are luuuudicrous levels of reverb involved; Broadrick’s Jesu-phase fingerprints are all over the glassware, drawing down the edges of possibility and pinning them out like delicate dead butterflies with booming percussion and playing-down-a-tunnel guitar tones. There aren’t many people who can make a record sound huger than Devin Townsend, but Broadrick’s surely one of them: where Townsend packs every Hertz of spare spectrum with something, Broadrick paints in separated yet loosely-constrained horizontal strokes, like a late-period Rothko done in a pallet of glassy blues, greens and greys. So far, so good – but the vocals are too haircut-hardcore for my taste, veering from earnestly brow-furrowed clean-sung verses to occasional fucked-throat strangled roar-screech-screams and youthful HxC gang-shouts. But I can look beyond that, thanks to these simple yet sky-wide soundscapes, a million sonic miles – or so it seems – between the nigh-subsonic bass and the brittle ringing of what might be a lead guitar or a keyboard, or both, or neither; there’s room enough in there for flying, if you’ve the wings to hand and the time to spare.

As the album progresses, though, I’m increasingly of the opinion that Constants would be better listening as an instrumental act, or at least one that sung a lot less. I ended up thinking of If Tomorrow The War as the audio equivalent of a Necker cube: if I listen to it one way, it’s widescreen floaty post-rock/metal with some synthetic elements (and some positively Balearic chill-out passages, like the digital drums and floaty complements to the subsonic bludgeon of “Maya Ruin”), but if I listen to it another way, it’s an average drop-C emo-core outfit flicking their fringes about and playing ludicrously loud at the other end of an empty aircraft hanger while I hold the microphone by the main doors… though “Spiders In White” comes across much bigger and bolder, thanks to the inclusion of guest vocals from Andrew Neufeld, whose Townsend-produced Sights & Sounds outfit I was duly impressed by last year.

So, something of a mixed bag, at least for me: I like the sense of the huge and epic that Constants are striving for, and I surely like the sound Broadrick has found to help them get there. But the underlying aesthetic is one that I’m more than a little bored of, and as much of a breath of fresh air the cathedral-like spaces of If Tomorrow The War may be, I can’t quite make myself ignore the well-worn psalms being sung inside of them. So it’s top marks to Constants for bravely stepping into a new sonic space, but next time I want to hear the songwriting undergoing just as radical a change, OK?

(And yes, that does mean I’d like there to be a next time; If Tomorrow The War ain’t perfect, but I can hear lots of promise in here. And anyone who names their album’s last track after a Philip K Dick novel deserves a free pass, so far as I’m concerned.)