It’s safe to say Nadja have been around the block a few times, and whilst Fawn Limbs haven’t been around anywhere near as long, they have no doubt cemented themselves as a pioneer for technical metal taken to its absolute extreme. The caustic grinding walls of industrial sound and polyrhythms are played off against noisy ambient doom in this killer split record Vestigial Spectra. The product of remote file sharing during the height of the COVID pandemic, this is a veritable cornucopia of contrast and oxymoron. Where ambiance and noise meet claustrophobic growled vocals, this EP emerges like two converging tectonic plates.
Despite the fact both Nadja and Fawn Limbs are so different (although they have flown close to each other on their musical journeys) you wouldn’t notice because Vestigial Spectra’s songs blend seamlessly into each other indicating an attentive, harmonious writing process. You would be remiss to expect this great lumbering beast of an record to perhaps lose some impetus over the length and breadth of its aural tirade, perhaps even lose its way. However, the cohesiveness of the piece is one of its greatest strengths, as the soundscape effortlessly morphs from grindcore to doom metal, to ambient and noise and back again without ever skipping a beat, or a step.
“A space where the relationship, conflict and oxymoronic nature of the two genres come together to create a piece of art that just works in its totality.”
The main theme of Vestigial Spectra is astronomical spectroscopy, a field of science where light is broken down and analysed to so that scientists can determine the make up of space born objects. The layers of light mirror the layers of lyrical content, noise and ambient work that goes on throughout the EP, with lyrics that at times would be as at home in a scientific handbook as they would be on the tattered sheets scrawled by the bands themselves during production. Lyrics like, “thermal imbalances narrows down,” and “metaphasing between nebulae, aligned,” tow the line creating another balancing act to go alongside the carefully positioned musical content and scientific astral entropy the album purveys.
This record, a precision balancing act between two seemingly disparate musical keystones, is a triumph in collaboration. A space where the relationship, conflict and oxymoronic nature of the two genres come together to create a piece of art that just works in its totality. Nadja and Fawn Limbs have produced something special here, that wouldn’t be out of place on a touring cycle, despite the fact it might look a little weird on a live stage, do you rotate the members on stage? Or do they stick around like an ambient version of Bez from the Happy Mondays, or a technical mathgrind variation of Flavor Flav hyping the audience into a sustained cosmic trance, whilst awaiting their opportunity to pound you into the void in search of more interstellar genre bending space dust?