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RLYR - Delayer

Album Review: RLYR - Delayer

Delayer falls somewhere between a traditional studio record and a live capture. RLYR was born of an improvised live collaboration between guitarist Trevor Shelley de Brauw (of Pelican) and drummer Steven Hess (of Locrian). Following their set, they enlisted the bottom end of Colin DeKuiper (of Bloodiest, ex-Russian Circles) to flush out a full length record emphasizing improvisation and general freedom over the weight of deliberate production.

The opening track “Slipstream Summer” emphasizes Trevor Shelley de Brauw’s signature angular guitar work, familiar to any fan of Pelican. All three veterans of Chicago’s legendary experimental rock community unleash a wild energy unlike anything they’ve been a part of before as they burst into a massive yet streamlined depth and breadth of tone. This track sounds like a pre-teen boy sprinting through an open field of tall grasses, sun glaring down, chest pounding, screaming at the top of his lungs with joy. It sets the stage for an album full of naturally cathartic post-rock uninhibited by the scheduling and scoring that the genre traditionally employs.

“Slipstream Summer” runs directly into “Delayer”, a track that drills and pounds into the listener’s subconscious without being overtly abrasive. After minutes of soaring guitar/synth pitches and washy cymbal blasts, Hess introduces a galloping floor tom that builds into massive major chord bell tone hits, drawing to mind the slowed-down sonic bursts of a symphony orchestra in the final bars of Sibelius’ Symphony No 2. Shot after shot, RLYR releases a sonic energy that quakes the very foundations of what rock music can be.

The mathematical strut of “Reconductor” again brings the listener to a familiar yet eerily different sound. DeKuiper squeezes out rotund bass harmonies while de Brauw has some sort of cavernous back-echo on his guitar, giving the sound of giant stones rolling against one another. Eschewing genre indentity, RLYR approaches a guitar-heavy indie rock sound and then directly transitions into a chugging build up that could have been lifted right out of the latest Pelican album. Hess’ crystalline cymbal cracks juxtapose divinely with a glacial chugging from a downtuned de Brauw and locked in DeKuiper. Out of nowhere, De Brauw launches into an expansive shredding that references the same sort of blissful natural high cited in “Slipstream Summer”. The song concludes with the unbelievably thick strut it began with.

The album’s magnum opus, “Descent of the Night Bison” is the twenty-three minute re-creation of Hess and de Brauw’s original improvised collaboration. The gentle caress of layers and layers of guitar noise set the stage for one of the most truly “cinematic” works of music I’ve listened to in my life. Hess gently rolls and claps on all drums and cymbals as the bison stamps and snorts on the purpley black-blue of the prairie in the deep of winter. A clean gentle guitar melody, barely hovering over the rest of the mix, slowly lights up the scene as pricks of light appear in the open sky. Hess’ bison continue to breathe and beat as DeKuiper’s bass becomes the sound of the earth slowly rotating on its axis, the sound one makes in their head when reminded that the earth does indeed move, often late at night, alone, sometimes far in the wild.

The bison begin running with the rumbling floor tom as de Brauw plays an uneasy-sounding and simple guitar riff, calling to mind old-school instrumental bands scoring western movies, eventually wandering into a dirty indie rock swagger with heavy snare on 2 and 4. Briefly, de Brauw and DeKuiper swap roles as the bass lends a gliding melody to the pounding of the rest of the ensemble. RLYR basks in the ferocious massiveness of their sound, rather than gloat in technicality, as the epic tone poem crashes back into the very same ethereality with which it began.

It is incredibly impressive and refreshing to see musicians of this pedigree explore lighter textures with the same audacity that they have in their most extreme moments across the 4 tracks that make up Delayer. While their contemporaries might favor the scheduled behavior of a lengthy drama, these veterans have released a collection of innovative instrumental music that screams with spontaneous joy and genuine release.

-EH