The signature of Insect Ark's Marrow Hymns is one of both beauty and dread. The style of playing is subdued and relaxed, like a desert mirage, but beneath the facade of ease, there are hints of dark mystery to be unearthed.
Nearly all of Marrow Hymns is bound by a singular dream state, rarely breaking from the spell. "In The Nest" and "Slow Ray" would be perfect matches to scenes out of a dark, dismal Western like Cormac McCarthy's, Blood Meridian, in which nomadic travellers brave the yawning expanse of the desolate landscape with a shrinking hope of salvation. "Skin Walker" provides some welcome surge of danger into the mix with its more abrupt stomp, momentarily breaking the mirage before falling back into the heat wave.
"Sea Harps" is a melancholy orchestra of drawn-out strings, sounding gentle in a flowing wind, weightless and unreal, while "Tarnish" takes the listener out of their body and into the ethereal, where there is no foundation of rhythm to cling to.
Marrow Hymns embodies a slow stream of atmosphere more than a series of distinct songs, resulting in a mostly uniform whole of elegant minimalism that gradually shifts and transforms into varying shapes, like clouds adrift in the sky. Insect Ark draw as much from the twang of country as from drone or doom, but produce something intoxicatingly unique in Marrow Hymns, which bears more similarities with experimental groups like Barn Owl or Godspeed You! Black Emperor than anything else.
(Profound Lore)Nearly all of Marrow Hymns is bound by a singular dream state, rarely breaking from the spell. "In The Nest" and "Slow Ray" would be perfect matches to scenes out of a dark, dismal Western like Cormac McCarthy's, Blood Meridian, in which nomadic travellers brave the yawning expanse of the desolate landscape with a shrinking hope of salvation. "Skin Walker" provides some welcome surge of danger into the mix with its more abrupt stomp, momentarily breaking the mirage before falling back into the heat wave.
"Sea Harps" is a melancholy orchestra of drawn-out strings, sounding gentle in a flowing wind, weightless and unreal, while "Tarnish" takes the listener out of their body and into the ethereal, where there is no foundation of rhythm to cling to.
Marrow Hymns embodies a slow stream of atmosphere more than a series of distinct songs, resulting in a mostly uniform whole of elegant minimalism that gradually shifts and transforms into varying shapes, like clouds adrift in the sky. Insect Ark draw as much from the twang of country as from drone or doom, but produce something intoxicatingly unique in Marrow Hymns, which bears more similarities with experimental groups like Barn Owl or Godspeed You! Black Emperor than anything else.
