The Sabians
Beauty For Ashes

Justin Marler.

The Asbestosdeath first, then the name is changed to Sleep and Volume One is recorded.
Then nothing, or rather: the crisis, despair, depression, the desire for death. Meet a monk. Say goodbye to friends climbing the sacred mountain and accompany the brother to the monastery.
Locked up for seven years, most on a deserted island. In Alaska.
Dormitory and refectory.
You don't find God, you just find yourself.
Seven years of solitude to rediscover yourself.

Say goodbye to the monks, call an old friend, ask him if he feels like pounding on the drums while he sings. Haikus agrees, Marler rolls up his sleeves and calls a guitar and a bass. Return to the rehearsal room, leave doom behind, do what you want.

Melody and punches, it’s 2002, less than ten years ago it would have been called alternative metal.
If there weren't two Sleeps, it would be called alternative metal.
But there are two Sleeps and it's all more complicated, random words are pulled out, like Pink Floyd, Johnny Cash, Doom, Folk, Punk, Hard Rock. But it's alternative metal. Beautiful.

Justin sings, like Al sings, like Matt sings: perfect for what he does. Perhaps he sings better than his former companions, he manages to be the center of the group, the screw around which the hands turn, The voice.
Without the drugs, the monastery, the crisis, the solitude of Alaska, everything would be different.
The sacred mountain would be different, the weedians would be different, and there wouldn't be one of the best alternative metal albums ever. Which maybe isn't alternative metal, maybe it's really a heap of words pulled out willy-nilly.

Now you can go out and say it loud to the whole neighborhood: crises are useful, to you and to others. They convince you that the world is not flat and two-dimensional, there are various perspectives and vanishing points to hold on to.
Or you can avoid throwing out words willy-nilly and thank Justin for having fallen. And thank him for getting back up.
And you can finally say that this is an alternative metal album. Beautiful.

If someone hadn't already done it in one of the most jaw-dropping reviews on the internet (a page that every time I read it makes me feel like a chickpea on the tip of a fork), I would have made you a list of everything this album is not. Marler himself, in an interview about the second work of the Sabians, maintains that it is easier to say what their sound is not rather than trying to catalog it into something already known. But perhaps, all in all, it is because while alternative metal was laughing and singing, he was alone, on a deserted island, trying to be reborn. And he did, he did with a bang. Indeed