Jarboe - MahaKali Review

Posted by Ian Parmenter on 11.27.2008

I wish that I had chosen to review this for Halloween and not Thanksgiving...



Track Listing:
1) MahaKali, of Terrifying Countenance
2) And The Sky Which Was Once Filled With Light...
3) The House Of Void
4) Transmogrification
5) From Afar, Upon The Back of a Tiger
6) The Soul Continues
7) A Sea Of Blood And Hollow Screaming
8) Overthrown
9) Mouth of Flames
10) Ascend

One of the great things about music is that, no matter how much music you listen to, you can always, always, always be introduced to someone you haven’t heard before, and find out they’ve been making music for… well, a lot longer than you would have expected. Such is the case with today’s artist, Jarboe, who has been making music (solo or in a group) since 1984, and I’ve never heard of her.

The best way to describe this disc is as ‘goth metal without the metal’, but even that’s not 100% accurate. While dark and, frankly, scary at times, it doesn’t really reach the quintessential ‘gothic’ feel… it’s more of a sheer horror feel, to the point where you think this woman needs to handle the score for a horror movie (And, according to Ye Olde Wikipedia, she’s actually doing the soundtrack to a horror game, so… close enough).

Because of this, the album needs to be reviewed somewhat differently than most albums; just like horror movies need to be reviewed differently from most other movies. You’re expecting something different; melodic singing, powerful lyrics, and stirring musical composition don’t have a place here… the music is secondary to the mood it evokes. With lyrics like “In a room of fire / In a room of pain” (A line which repeats constantly through “The Soul Continues”), you know you’re not going to get a Best Songwriting award… but you certainly are going to get freaked out. When these lyrics accompany dark, harsh guitars and bass and neo-druidic drums, you begin to realize this isn’t anything you haven’t heard before… you just haven’t heard it in quite this way. There are some interesting effects (An early track features a woman’s scream where you would expect to hear a guitar riff, and despite the fact you’re listening to ‘scary’ music, it’s still enough to jolt you), and they’re enough to make this feel less like a sequel to all the other scary music you’ve heard, and more like a remake.

I know, I know, this is the 411 Music zone, not the 411 Movies zone. But the movie metaphor is an apt one. A lot of the ‘scary’ / ‘goth’ music out there tries to get a vibe from singing about gory details in an overdramatic fashion while using the music to accent the singer; on this disc, the vocals are there to assist the music, it doesn’t want to talk about things that squick you out, it wants to give you a vaguely unsettling feeling that grows until you have the urge to tear the headphones off your head and go lock your door so that nothing can come get you in your cozy, well-lit apartment as you go fetal on the couch waiting for the bad vibes you’re getting to go away. You have strategic use of thunder, creepy voices, and other sound effects designed not to give you a ‘jump scare’, but to help build up that feeling of unease, that dread in the pit of your stomach. In a way, this is the audio version of classic horror movies like The Exorcist where most music in this genre is along the lines of slasher movies.

The main problem is that the disc manages to forget this. After seven tracks of creepy, you get “The Overthrown,” which is… very much exactly what I’ve been saying this disc is not. It’s a vocal-focused track with over-wrought lyrics and background music that attempts to make it feel more dramatic than it really is. I can see why they thought a change of pace was needed; after all, you have seven tracks of anxiety-inducing sonic scary-stuff. But this was not the change of pace needed; it feels like a completely different artist, like you’ve been at a concert for half an hour, you’re getting into the groove, and then the band leaves the stage and some hack local band comes out to do a set. It’s the sign of a total thematic shift; the following tracks (“Mouthful of Flames” and "Ascend") should have an almost funeral-esque / ending credits feel to it, but it’s ruined by the track before it and just comes off as slow and uninspired where it should be serving as a wind-down period, a chance to shake some, but not all, of the shakes you’ve gotten from the rest of the album.

Again with the movie metaphors. You’ve read movie reviews that say “The first hour is great, but the film’s ending just seems tacked on and ruins the first part that you liked so much.” This is going to be the music version of that. The first seven tracks can generate a feeling of horror like very little music I’ve heard in the last ten years. It keeps building up and building up, and you’re waiting for something to break… and just before it does, you get a nonsensical goth-rock revelation of a climax, followed by a denouement that takes the climax far more seriously than you ever could have, and then the credits roll to music that tries to invoke the early movie, but is too much like the ending to be enjoyable. The last three tracks feel like they were done for a different album entirely; only “Ascend” manages to retain enough of the theme of the first 70% of the album to feel like it belongs here. And that’s a shame, because this had the potential to be so much more than it ended up being.

(Postscript: I have learned that the music I was provided to review does not match the track listing for either the CD or digital release of this album; I was provided the ten tracks listed above; there should be fifteen. I appear to be missing a track inserted between "Mouth of Flames" and "Ascend", and four more at the end. I regret that I was not able to review the full album as the artist intended.)

The 411: If you’re looking for music that’s fit for giving people nightmares… not bloody ones, but sheer gut-wrenching horror ones… you’ve found your album. With a sophisticated mastery of sound and emotion, Jarboe didn’t make MahaKali for you, she made it for that dark festering pit inside your stomach. But stop listening after Track 7… the last three will only serve to make you wonder why you bothered listening to the whole thing. If not for those three, this would be a 7.5/8.0 rating, easily.

Final Score:  6.0   [ Average ]