Her Name is Calla have worked hard in recent years, with a succession of highly original and compelling single and EP releases, and a pretty heavy touring schedule. This has earned them a deal with Denovali, and, perhaps most importantly, a dedicated fan-base. This, their debut album, has been a long time in coming. However, Her Name is Calla aren't a band to rush out something half-baked and half-finished: they're perfectionists, and as such, have taken the time to craft the material, tweak it, road-test it, tweak it, then tweak it some more. The resulting record is more than worth the wait, and the patience of the fans is duly rewarded by this suitably epic set: there may be 'only' eight songs, but there are two tracks that push toward the twenty-minute mark, and the total running time is a whopping hour and a quarter. No short change there, and no mistake.
In terms of evolution, 'The Quiet Lamb' represents an immense leap for Her Name is Calla, and it's abundantly evident that they're not a band who are content to plough the same furrow. Instead, while continuing to extend the orchestral elements that have been increasingly prominent in their work, Her Name is Calla are clearly a band who strive to push themselves in new directions and to produce music of increasing complexity and depth to express their vision. And what vision! Remarkably, the ambition is matched by the album's accomplishment.
While one couldn't really describe 'The Quiet Lamb' as a concept album, it is very much a journey, and one that rises and falls, ebbs and flows and leads the listener through an intense, and occasionally harrowing, trip of emotional depth and sonic texture. It certainly isn't an album that grabs the listener by the throat with an aural assault: quite the opposite, in fact: in many places, it's whisperingly quiet, like the breeze through the trees, and draws the listener in with its hushed atmosphere. There are blasts of noise, however, and they have even greater impact due to the contrast they provide, and the strategic points at which they are located.
It's a tantalising and willfully measured introduction, with the six-minute instrumental 'Moss Giant' so quiet and so ambient it's hardly there at first, before a rolling cymbal and sparse piano, backed by a subtle yet tense string teeters in the distance. This leads into 'A Blood Promise' which is also hushed, reverent and fragile, and as such, stands out as a rather daring move in these days of compressed, middled-out sonic conformity. Dynamic range is a prominent feature on this album.
There's a very natural, organic feel to this album, and natural images abound within the sparse lyrics that are imbued with an emotional resonance because of, rather than in spite of, their blurred, borderline abstract formation. However, rather than celebrating nature in a pastoral fashion, we're led through a bleak and wild world, in which man can never overcome the elements: 'The wilderness closes in quietly,' Tom cautions on 'Long Grass,' while on 'Condor and River' the tranquillity of the 'secret place' is tainted by 'your body covered in cuts.' Indeed, those moments of gentility, as represented by delicate tracks like 'Homecoming' and 'Thief' lull the listener into a false sense of security, the calms before the storms - and storms there certainly are, with tempests of incredible force striking with unbridled power.
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While including the aforementioned 'Condor and River,' a much older song, this is no case of throwing in an earlier single to bulk up the set: re-recorded here, with a much cleaner sound (but with no loss of density or drama), it forms an integral part of the whole. The whole, meanwhile, is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. It's impossible to dissect the arrangements, the individual contributions, the song structures. 'The Quiet Lamb' goes beyond that. In fact, it goes beyond mere music, its ambition and scope so monumental and so vividly realised as to be transcendental. The climactic moments of 'A Blood Promise' and the breathtaking 'Pour More Oil' are almost beyond description.
The three-part finale, 'The Union' is a truly remarkable composition: 'Part I: I Worship a Golden Sun' is perhaps the band's most intense piece to date, the instrumentation and vocal delivery combining to convey a gut-wrenching passion in the lines 'I worship a golden sun; I worship a dying sun.' It's not so much post-rock as post-apocalypse. This gives way to 'Part II: Recidivist,' a truly monumental instrumental section, howling feedback building like a hurricane until something must surely give, and colossal, crunching guitars, slow and so, so heavy - doomy and droney enough to sound as though they've been lifted directly from a Sunn O))) album - crush everything that came before. In the wake of this sonic devastation, there's another storm, a maelstrom of piledriving guitars battling with brass that's pure Mexicana (yes, bizarre, but even more bizarrely, it works to magnificent effect!) propelled by drumming one might expect to find on a later Swans album ('m thinking along the lines of 'I Am the Sun' from 'The Great Annihilator' or 'Power and Sacrifice' from 'White Light from the Mouth of Infinity'). Indeed, the enormity of the sound, and the breadth of vision here is, in many ways, reminiscent of those later Swans releases: music that is simply too big to contain, or to capture in a few words.
The only way to approach this type of music is through complete immersion. The currents are strong and nature always wins, so there is little point in fighting...
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