“By Chance or by Design”: Fires in the Distance’s Circadian Promise
“I miss you most of all.”
Back in 2023, I had no trouble finding my way into Air Not Meant for Us, the sophomore release from Connecticut’s melodic death/doom quartet Fires in the Distance. Its grand, anguished beauty was precisely the kind of oxygen meant for me at a time of intense personal upheaval and a seemingly depthless grief. It is jarring to think back over the last three years, take stock, and wonder at the great distance between now and then as well as its shuddering propinquity. It’s still so live, my memories of it so sharp, that it’s shocking to feel just how much it has also receded. To be so bereaved and to have an album of such exquisite enormity as Air Not Meant for Us fortifies and animates you. It is, to be blunt about it, to experience life more intensely and profoundly. No wonder it still feels so near.
So what does one do when that same band returns three years later with an album that is, according to founding guitarist and songwriter Yegor Savonin, darker and even more invested in death, loss, and the bleaknesses of reality than past albums when your own experience of life, though of course beset daily by the iniquities of those who would wish us all dead, is calmer, less mired in agony, sturdier? You sit astonished, tongue-tied, at a loss for words. You give yourself over, let yourself be moved. You simply marvel at a staggering accomplishment, because a staggering accomplishment is what Circadian Promise is.
Out Friday June 12 via Prosthetic Records, Savonin and Co. return with the band’s third album. While Brendan Hayter (Thrawsunblat, Obsidian Tongue, Namebearer) has replaced Kristian Grimaldi on vocals/guitars, the rest of the band is intact, including producer Dave Kaminsky and “orchestration maestro” Randy Slaugh. It’s not worth imagining what Fires in the Distance would be like without Slaugh’s presence, but it is worth foregrounding his impact on the band as a whole and Circadian Promise in particular. The passages of Circadian Promise with strings and piano are even more arresting than on Air Not Meant For Us. They are, in part, what call to mind influences such as Swallow the Sun and Amorphis and also what set Fires in the Distance apart from their predecessors and contemporaries. Three years ago, I wrote, “The piano and the classical strings are the life-giving water that acts contrapuntally to the album’s scorched-earth sense of catastrophic finality.” All over Circadian Promise, they expand and deepen the record, providing a kind of fathomless dimensionality to the album’s sorrow. On “Once the Silence Takes Your Place,” arguably the album’s best song, piano notes haunt nearly every moment, a sort of ghostly and gothic emphasis that finds the band in Paradise Lost territory. The band is simultaneously at its heaviest and its most delicate on “Once the Silence Takes Your Place,” its most alive and most forlorn. To say nothing of the synthy transition 5 minutes into it, the track is cinematic and grandiose, theatrical and soaring. If Circadian Promise was simply “Once the Silence Takes Your Place,” with Hayter’s clean vocals rising to such great heights of calamity, it would be enough. You would have to accept it as all you could ask of a band. And yet.
And yet there is an entire album, 5 more tracks to astound you. Most recently, the band released third single “By This Time Tomorrow,” featuring the talents of Dark Tranquility‘s Johan Reinholdz. “Shimmering snow covers a path we all fear / but this time there’s no turning back / to say my goodbyes if only within my own heart / as life starts to spill from my eyes,” begins the song, a dreadful sense of being too late too many times. Even if you could turn back, you could not utter aloud your feelings. It is a doubling of the impossibility of doing anything about what has already been done. As Adam Phillips tells us, perhaps to our chagrin, “Time cannot be literally redeemed, or reversed; we cannot go back to the time before the terrible things were done, before we did the terrible things: at the same time we meant to do what we did, whatever the consequences may have been. But the question—the question that makes the second chance a possibility—is, What kind of conversations can our ineradicable guilt make possible, or even inspire?” There is a sense of poetry that “By This Time Tomorrow” is the album’s shortest track by several minutes. It can’t go on any longer, because you cannot redeem or revise time, you cannot go back to before whatever happened happened. To this end, the song includes a sample of Alan Watts reading from Out of Your Mind. It is “those moments when life really seems to be taking us away, and the stream of change is going to swallow us completely” that we must drop our resistances, that we must “go over the waterfall,” that we must “go on from one day to the next.” Instead of fleeing from the snow-covered path we all fear, we must take it. And so we get to wonder what might be possible by taking that path, whether it is a second chance or death. “The as-yet unlived life that that is our second chance carries what we presume to be our potential,” illuminates Phillips. Instead of saying the goodbye that you twice over cannot say, what else might you say? Circadian Promise, at least it seems to me, is one kind of answer you could give.
With my sincere apologies to opener “Of Radiance and Levitation,” the dazzling, galloping “To You, Author of My Fade”—which, my god, what a song—and the fitting closer “Agonal Dreaming,” I will bring this review to something like a conclusion with “Lightless Days of a Songless Bird,” a song full of heartbreaking pathos and one that returns us to that familiar sense of speechlessness: “And in the end, the wings of a songless bird will be denied the sky / you’ve lost the words to speak / your only chance has passed you by / and as the sun withdraws forever, the moon begins the guide / enchained by hidden tethers, by chance or by design.” Here is the moment, coupled with my favourite riff of the whole album (beginning right at 5:00), that I finally found my way into Circadian Promise. The image of this bird, born or rendered songless, being denied as well its flight. Again, it is a doubling of our sorrow, a compounding devastation, that leaves the bird almost entirely bereft of what makes her a bird. Denied both flight and song, what is left for the bird? In the first of the twelve episodes of Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie, Paul recounts words from an essay a child wrote about her favourite animal, “The bird has an inside and an outside. Remove the outside and you find the inside. Remove the inside, and you find the soul.” The bird, here, is clearly Nana, as the film pans to focus directly on her at the pinball machine as Paul recites the child’s essay. As Susan Sontag argues this moment—in a film of “wordless sounds, or even wordless images”—we are being prepared for, through proof and not analysis, how Nana’s story will end, with her soul freed from exteriority or interiority. (Not for nothing, in Episode XI of Vivre Sa Vie, the philosophé suggests to Nana, “It’s always struck me, the fact we can’t live without speaking.” “So to live speaking, he says later in the conversation, “one must past through the death of life without speaking.”) In both “Lightless Days of a Songless Bird” and Vivre Sa Vie, what’s left is cold reality. In Godard’s film, it is the cold reality, it is Nana’s death, in “Lightless Days of a Songless Bird” it is that something, your only chance, whatever that may have been, has passed you by.
Throughout Circadian Promise, we are always just on the other side of the thing that happened, and we are always lamenting our belatedness. This also takes me back to the drama at the heart of Henry James’ excellent “The Beast in the Jungle.” Whatever else may or may not transpire in the story, May Bartram indexes for John Marcher what he has missed in life: “what was to happen had so absolutely and finally happened that he was as little able to know a fear for his future as to know a hope; so absent in short was any question of anything still to come.” Marcher is left incapable of fear and hope, unable to know either because he cannot even wonder what might come next. This seems to me to be the philosophy behind Circadian Promise. Later in “Lightless Days of a Songless Bird,” Hayter cries out, at perhaps his most heartsick, “Why can’t I remember when I lost it all?” What tragedy, what torment, what pain to know you have lost it all but to have forgotten when or even how it happened. No song, no flight, no words, no chance, no anything; not even a memory of when or how it all unfolded. It is loss and emptiness at their most irresolvable and irrevocable. And yet. And yet so much of Circadian Promise is precisely about what is on the other side, what might happen when you do keep moving. In his notes to the album, Savonin repeatedly emphasizes perseverance, acceptance, and “a courage to keep going in the face of circumstances which could easily cause devastating effects on the perspective of what is still to come.” Circadian Promise, then, is an album about possibilities and refusing to allow shattering grief to foreclose or over-prescribe those possibilities. In an essay on EM Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born, Adam Phillips concludes, “So the worst—whatever we take the worst to be—becomes another thing we might be able to use, or find out if we can use, in the project of getting the life we want.” The worst, whether it be not being born, or aging and dying, or losing it all, is, Phillips hazards, a potentially transformative experience in accepting or even shaping “what is still to come.” “Lightless Days” thus ends with a slight amendment, “And as the sun withdraws forever, the moon becomes the guide. Eroded chains I sever, by chance or by design.” While we still cannot be sure of our motivations or circumstances (chance or design), we are no longer tethered. The chains have eroded and been severed. An act has taken place. Whatever happens next… well, who can say?
5/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
Circadian Promise is out now via Prosthetic Records.
