I am already a chronic daydreamer, but I can’t recall an album so powerfully inducing waking unconsciousness as Whiteout. This isn’t because it causes the listener to tune out. Rather, its immersiveness is so intense that they’ll find themselves dead to the world midway through the first track. This is the fifth full-length from the Viennese four-piece, with a slew of other musicians in tow, and it largely follows in their signature trajectory of post-metal meets dark ambient. However, perhaps more so than before, Phal: Angst emphasize the cinematic with long, subtly evolving pieces of deceptive simplicity. The result is a shifting dreamlike musical canvas, whose sixty-five-minute stretch is far too well-constructed to be offensively long. Music of this caliber can often fade away quickly into unmemorability if it’s too anodyne, but Phal: Angst stay just on the right side of this line.
Whiteout’s main power is how emotionally affecting it manages to be with apparently little at its disposal. The album is mostly instrumental, the rasping near-whisper snarls often waiting until near halfway through tracks to make an appearance When they do, their comprehensibility only increases the intensity they gain from their sparseness, repeating and reverberating over synths. Scattered, distorted samples add further, strange voices to the soundscape, deepening the immersion and increasing the oddly thoughtful atmosphere. One such sample takes from a performance of Macbeth’s dying soliloquy (“Severance”).1 It accentuates the music’s already dark and melancholic tone, particularly when it resurges with greater prominence on the closing Jarboe remix “A Tale of Severance.” That these feature the most memorable guitar melody doesn’t hurt either. The prevailing sensibility of the record is this downcast mournfulness, punctuated by waves of restless ennui achieved through hypnotically repeating waves of synth, chiming metallophone, and subtle fuzz. It enters instantly through the wistful piano that opens “Whiteout,” rises through the sweetly sad, syrupy tremolo in “Least Said, Soonest Mended,” and the wash of gothic synthwave and pleading rasps at the apex of “What a Time to be Alive.”
It is with these affecting melodies and hazy atmospheres that Phal: Angst cast a heavy mood with subtle beauty. Passages that are largely synth-driven, with guitar notes shimmery and distorted, feel weighty, even though they are not ‘heavy’ in the metal sense. With long sections of more subdued brooding (“Unhinged”) or feedback-blistered repetition (“What Rests Mute in Bright Corners,” “What a Time…”) the group infuse a bleakness that’s nonetheless quite alluring. This also makes the passages of melodic exploration that creep up out of each track more effective, like the soaring of a bird against the dark grey skies that the music generally evokes. By keeping those melodies simple, by emphasizing atmosphere, “Severance” can entrance, and “Least Said…”‘s melancholic refrain can mesmerize. On the reverse end—relatively—”What a Time…”‘s more progressive flow through electronic, sample, and post-metal shades is immersive because of how it manages to maintain the same, dour feeling of recurrence throughout its flow.
There are some small hitches to the experience, however. While they have grown on me, the flatly-delivered cleans that grace the back half of “Unhinged” are a little grating. This is particularly so when contrasted with the genuinely lovely post-metal dream pop singing of “Least Said…” Moreover, some of the more monotonous sections threaten to break the immersion that the album overall creates, which would probably be mitigated by just a little cutting. The inclusion of two remix tracks might seem the most obvious candidate if one were to start trimming, but personally, I’d leave them in because each amplifies and interprets the mood of the original in satisfying ways. “A Tale of Severance” is especially potent, not least because of how it emphatically closes the album with the echoing words of Macbeth and the whispered “so long…” Taken together, the minor gripes still don’t do much to lessen Whiteout’s ability to envelop, because the whole kind of washes together dreamily.
It’s possible I picked this up at the perfect time, the synthy, moody soundscapes a fitting accompaniment to the grey January days. But it’s definitely not only that. Whiteout is a brilliant example of understatement done right, and its magnetic envelopment is real. There are certainly worse ways to lose an hour in hazy daydreaming.
Rating: Very good (3,5/6)
