On the Way

This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I share many of the posts from that blog when I write them, as they fit in well here too. This one is about the experimental depth and existential ambience of Spurv, for instance. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post on the best albums of 2022 in post-rock, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.

Die Sterblichen sind die Menschen. Sie heißen die Sterblichen, weil sie sterben können. Sterben ist den Tod als Tod vermögen. Nur der Mensch stirbt und zwar fortwährend, solange er auf der Erde, unter dem Himmel, vor den Göttlichen bleibt. Nennen wir die Sterblichen, dann denken wir schon die anderen drei mit doch wir bedenken nicht die Einfalt der Vier.

Heidegger, “Bauen, Wohnen, Denken” as appearing in Spurv’s “allting får sin ende, også natten”

My English translation with a couple notes on Heidegger’s philosophy:

The dyingly (mortals) are human beings. They are the dyingly because they can die. Dying is being capable of death in the capacity of death (i.e. not simply ignorantly perishing without self-reflection on the scope of life rather living with an awareness of death being the limit and finitude of one’s existence). Only humans die, and truly, continuously as long as they remain on the earth, under the heavens, before the godly. When we mention the dyingly, we already think of the other three with it (earth, heavens, and godly), but we don’t think of the simplicity of the four.

This quote is a clip at the beginning of a song with a title in Norwegian that means: “Everything has its end, even the night.” Precisely this sentiment – standing within the twilight of the end and transitioning into new life beyond, the power, tragedy, and raw beauty of death and rebirth is a connecting thread I find in Spurv’s most poignant moments across their albums.

The most moving song, ‘Til en ny vår’, on their newest release, this year’s album of the year, Brefjære, is exactly that – a slow, gentle, cold, dead embrace of winter that grows and grows as warmth and change bring the thaw that eventually bursts forth into new life. I felt exactly that energy on a first listen, only associating the seasonal aspect when looking up the translation of the title. The song title means: to a new spring. The new album explores these emotional resonances in unique and experimental ways, incorporating vocals that feel elegiac, even a chorus that feels like an opera or the chorus from a Greek tragedy. Perhaps these are the elements from Greek mythology they point to as an inspiration in the long album description, as well as the harsh and dynamically alive beauty of the ecosystem in the Arctic Circle. This year’s release feels like a masterpiece of expression, fully bringing forth beauty, life, death – transition in ways that were still nascent yet powerful in their last two albums. In line with their band name, this album takes flight and soars, just like the clouds (the band’s name means Sparrow, and another song’s title translates to “like clouds”).

Honestly, however, this poetic set of accolades undersells this band, if anything. Few other post-rock bands have so flamboyantly charted their own course with exciting and engaging experimentation all of their own. Almost every time a post-rock band incorporates vocals, for instance, I’m dismayed. It nearly always makes them sound like fairly run of the mill alt-rock I listened to in the late 90s/early 2000s. The dynamism of the instruments is turned down to make room for a vocalist, and everything is weakened due to it – composition, power, and emotional depth. Spurv gets around this issue handily: using dynamic choruses, and different solo vocalists, allowing the album to feel like a story or dramatic enactment, rather than just another rock band with aspirations of doing something the same but different. In other words, they understand the interplay of form and content, style and substance.

This was just as clear to me with their previous album, Myra. The cover shows a blond woman hugging a stag in front of a misty forest. They both look sad, perhaps even lonely, and the album opens with trickling water and a pensive, brooding ambience that breaks into horns and a syncopated stumble of drums forward, almost at odds with itself and a heavy, rambling guitar that opens into crescendos of trilling tremolos above the cacophony. In other words, this album is haunting, and the band establishes itself as their own unique sound in the entire genre.

The final song of this album is that existential post-metal epic that I presented to open this post. I have a background and abiding love for the German language and German philosophy, so I was beyond stunned to hear this song for the first time, immediately recognizing from the phrasing, although I was unfamiliar with the voice, that this was the inimitable Heidegger. Although post-rock regularly uses seemingly random clips as part of the musical play, I never ever expected to hear German philosophy presented in the original language, precisely in a way that resonates with such a theme: all things have their end, even the night. This existential analysis is rife throughout Spurv’s work, and I hope that this post will lead you to explore with them.