This gnostic thunder is in Tritonic in Oh, Sinai! that sounds in the very blood, Peter Jewkes melodic singing with a Bowie overtones, tinctured with existential agony--haunting, unique, and drawing me into the questions of the cruelty of creation that had echoed my own late-nights cynicism with an uninformed universe. The friends were dispersed by the oceans, and having re-embarked in the Marketstall in London, the band is now in exile globally, which only adds to the radical sincerity of the band, which is austere and yet humanly welcoming, evoking feelings I did not anticipate in the depths of sludge-prog.
The tune blossoms to chant-like in the chorus, welcoming, but heroic, and jagged riffs by fretless guitar, homemade conversions, beckoning dissonance, open with uneasiness, beckoning the infinite ambiguity with which they seek. No pre-recorded samples, all is touching the physical world, stained with manipulation of real space, a mixture of hardcore hits with the whisper of the free-jazz and the noise of musique concrete. It was like a destruction giving birth to something holy, my heart beating to the intentional movement of the percussion between instability and rites.
Instrumentation goes on a spurt in the bridge with electronic layers and harmonies by layers, hard rock blending into immersive soundscapes that pervert the precision fetish of doom metal. Drums by Rob Channon grind with crust-punk violence, dueling guitars going wild amidst hypnotic gongs, for a gesamtkunstwerk where gnostic aberration themes collide with conventions, atheists struggling with shadow of deity in human existence.
Physically alone, defiant as the album Bend the Arc! to wax-dipped cassettes, active over passive streams, Oh, Sinai! seizes the indefinable monad in Liturgy-like chastity and Talk Talk cordiality. It was a shattering and rebuilding, the heretical course of the band since their pop-hugging in Port of Spain to this inaccessible ritual a testimony to curving the moral curves through sacrifice. Tritonic do not play heavy, they search souls, and it touched me, damn it--so deep, so pessimistic, so eternal.
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