“Out of Time / Out of Life”: Irreversible‘s Vessel
“Out of love.”
In 2023, Atlanta legends Irreversible reunited to play a show with now-retired Godflesh. I took the opportunity to go through the band’s discography and map their career trajectory. Three years later, Jacob Franklin, Zach Richards, and Billy Henis are back with the band’s first new album since 2015’s self-titled swan song. As I wrote back in 2023, Irreversible felt like the band, after assiduous experimentation a few years earlier, consciously returning to their roots to pay homage to their forebears as well as to their own understanding of what their band had been. A kind of self-knowing amor fati. With Vessel, released earlier this month via Dipterid Records, consider the love letter purloined, the ouroboros unsatisfied, history rewritten, and a life rising anew from that “Mandatory Death.” It’s never too late to kill your idols.
40 minutes stretch effortlessly across two tracks named for gods hailing from different mythologies. Featuring guest vocals and guitars from Justin Brush (Canopy), side-A “Esus” is a confrontation with the stupid cruelty of those who make life unnecessarily stupid and cruel for the rest of us. “Esus” begins with an admonition of dissembling and pretense: “Pretending / to be a person / Never taught (to know) / anything.” The parenthetical “(to know)” smuggles into this opening appraisal a deeper, more entrenched, or even entwined sense of ignorance and rejection. You pretend you weren’t taught. You pretend you weren’t taught the value of knowledge. You pretend, and so “Everything / Is a fucking nightmare.” This isn’t a fight over epistemes. This is direct cause and effect. “Evil,” after all, “is tangible.”
The first movement of “Esus” takes it nods equally from Mouth of the Architect as it does Swans. Bobby Power’s description of the track as a “sharper, colder…” refinement of the band’s earlier sound is apt, as there is certainly very little warmth in the first 6 minutes or so of “Esus.” Near the 7-minute mark, though, things do seem to thaw. This brief dissolution relents into a mammoth passage with all the heft of early-career ISIS. Subsequent post-rock moments of relative quiet and hushed rumblings abruptly transition into Author & Punisher-type industrial marching. “Esus” seems a mythology unto itself, drawing together as it does so many different sonic and narrative arrangements. What feels fragmented at times—shards scattered haplessly on the ground—is instead a band with heightened aspirations reaching for those goals and seeing a horizon just above your own.
As with “Esus,” “Thoth” invokes gods and welcomes into its embrace other Atlanta musicians (Spencery Ussery of Big Jesus and Johnny Dang of Hisself.) In “Esus,” we’re told, “Dreams aren’t safe.” In “Thoth,” however, our reality is so shot through with dreams and memories that a kind of permanent haziness suffuses all experience. And why shouldn’t we spend as much time exploring the ever-drifting world of our dreams in “Thoth” as we did our gruesome, embodied reality in “Esus?” As Jacqueline Rose writes in 1986’s Sexuality in the Field of Vision, “In fact, Freud’s move was… towards a dimension of reality all the more important for the subject because it goes beyond anything that can, or needs to be, attested as fact.” We spend so much of our time in the fantastic (and fantasmatic) worlds of our own creation that it might be outright dangerous (leading to the kind of “pretending” in “Esus”) to not consider, at least for a time, the impact and purport of these fantasies. “I saw you in a dream / You had a different face. / I saw you in a dream / You had a different name.” The recognizable and reliable drop away, the uncanny a different form of obliviousness here than the cowardly, violent, and hate-filled form on side-A. Of course, and though our unconscious is worth exploration and an attempt at knowing, these memories are still places where one “[knows] about drowning,” where destruction lurks, and tragedy will be (re)lived. It’s not escapism but rather a fuller accounting of the lives we lead.
It’s easy to get lost in the shimmery Jesu quality of “Thoth.” While it might hold fewer surprises than “Esus,” it has a sense of cohesion and grounding that works beautifully with its more reflective attitude. In the song’s second half, Irreversible reach for Cave In and Alcest both to scrape against the heavens. The song also recalls clearly the band’s 2014 Surface, an album full of clean, delicate passages and solos. It’s a beautiful, soul-shaking step forward and a self-assured acknowledgement of looking back. “There are many ways,” we are told, “to live in a tragedy.” There are many ways,” we are reminded, “to guide you underground.” At once meditative and disconsolate, musing and melancholic, the final few minutes of Vessel are another final attempt at weighing scales, taking stock, making sure it all adds up.
What do all these musical references new and old mean? Why return after a decade both the same and different? What about the world and our fantasy worlds have changed or haven’t changed a bit? What does the richness and complexity of Vessel do for us or for those who created it? Gary Indiana writes, “You go to a work of art and hope to be transformed. Quietly, secretly, to be roused from a waking sleep, agitated at some resonant depth in your psyche, shown something you couldn’t have shown yourself. Bresson shocks you into reconsidering your whole existence. Not in the cheap sociological way that makes so many current movies ‘relevant,’ but in the almost somnolently muffled, self-exasperated way that Sartre’s Nausea makes you see what is right in front of you as the infinitely strange, unassimilable horror that it is.” Art as a pathway out of a somnolent existence, as a hope to be transformed, as a necessary shaking-up our quotidian assumptions and a forceful reckoning with unassimilable qualities of everyday life. We need to be shocked out of our stupour.
It’s also, of course, always a return to and of our symptom, whatever it may be. All these various parts of Vessel, in their grand successes, to quote from another Indiana essay, “may tell us something about how little the things that are broken inside us every really get left behind.” I understand if that feels defeating, stultifying, or choking. It’s not, though. It’s life. We don’t leave those broken little things behind, but we live anyways, in tragedy, underground, and in many, hopefully endless, number of ways.
“The dirt is your mother / And eventually / she will hold you again.” But not today.
Vessel is out now via Dipterid Records.
Just a few pieces of wax remain, but CDs abound.
So do some really sick shirts.
I ordered one. You should, too.
