Album Review: Flame of Life – Magna

If you’re familiar with New York’s Flame of Life, then you won’t need any convincing to throw yourself into their new album, Magna.

Flame of Life have been a going concern since 2015, but this is the first time I’ve come across them and their spectacularly off-the-grid sound. It would be a disservice to the band to describe pieces like Cavaral and Aeves as songs. They don’t follow the expected structure and traditional narrative of pop or rock, and even the passing similarities to Primus soon veer off into a deconstructed series of loops, vocals, and noise.

Dai Ash Gore begins as a fairly conventional number before the darkness and the sound of the bass and percussion become something else, something more primal and at odds with expectations. Disco Aleomt also brushes with Primus before found sounds and chiming loops meet the vocals head-on.

There’s little like Flame of Life out there: Primus, like I’ve mentioned above, the early work of Einsturzende Neubauten – though maybe with a less dominant industrial and steel feel. The rhythms and inner sense of the music lie elsewhere again, with Philip Glass, Varèse, or Stockhausen making what could loosely be approximated as rock music at its widest parameters.  

This becomes increasingly noticeable as the album reaches its endpoint: Seafi Mar Atlaimt and Noemai tick by like a clock running to its own concept of time, and what the band are doing comes into greater focus, what the band has been doing through the album becoming the within grasp of the listener: distant relations of Beefheart or Stump at their wildest and most inventive. What has gone before all clicks into place.

Don’t look to Magna for winsome indie rock bops about love or life on the road. It’s confounding and confrontational, the application of the principles of musique concrète to a vision that is more abstract but just as exciting. Magna can be streamed and downloaded on Bandcamp.