Callisto
Noir

Polar cold. Forests, forests, and more forests on the horizon. It feels like being immersed in a Finnish night while listening to the new work by Callisto.

If "True Nature Unfolds," their first album, had already revealed the potential of these just-over-twenty Finns, "Noir" blooms from the post-core scene like a bolt from the blue. A rugged and ancient sound that allows itself to be penetrated by psychedelic bursts projected towards the unknown. Mammoth volumetry. Very dark and dense colors shaken with piercing feedbacks of hope. A breath-stealing slowness combined with majestic progressions that wait only to refract again into swampy post-rock or even prog environments.

Here, everything is blended in the best possible way, giving the often-abused word post-core new meanings. Callisto can truly aspire to become more than a great niche band. It's rare to find groups that can combine impact and undeniable technical skill with the ability to expand (radically, I would say) the boundaries of a genre. This happens in "Noir," 54 minutes played with the strength of metal but with foundations firmly set in post-rock and in that particular way of conceiving musical structures and linking ideas while avoiding the traps of prolixity.

As hard as it may seem to believe, Callisto apply the laws of musical expansion from the '70s to the circular rigor of post-hardcore. Their music is sulfurous and changing, punctuated by sudden surges and equally pervasive retreats into an astral asphyxiating calm. In the midst of all this, melodic openings with a devastating emotional impact draw a sort of infinite mantra in eternal, unpredictable becoming. Increasingly rare is the encounter with a rock group (rock is the right definition!) capable of surprising our ears saturated with familiar sounds. Wrongly or rightly inserted into the post-hardcore melting pot, Callisto distinguish themselves with a deep approach to content, ethereal at times, and aimed at developing music as an art form, an imaginative journey of colors with a thousand shades (almost always dark) that range from psychedelic hues (“A Close Encounter,” “Pathos”) to the perfect synthesis between post-rock and bolder metal (“The Fugitive”).

Often there is the sensation of majestic melancholy, which may seem an apparent oxymoron but in the group's interpretation embodies both a great intimacy that sometimes veers into elegiac flights, slowly growing almost stealthily, and a striking "physical" impact. Suddenly, you find yourself amidst a guitar vortex, like a storm that suddenly calms to make way for acoustic layers degrading into absolute peace. The zenith of these contrasts is reached in the magnificent “Folkslave,” 8 minutes and change that give the feeling of a solitary escape into nothingness: very slow chords and then a massive explosion that opens towards the light only to, as usual, return to touch dark and ancestral territories. It closes with “Woven Hands,” austere and terrible, a crossroad if it were possible to imagine it, between the more chamber-like Labradford and the genre masters Isis.

“Noir” is one of the most composite and least predictable albums I've listened to in 2006. Praise to those who still see music as a form of art to explore and grow, not a hit single to be played on the radio.