ASVA
What You Don't Know Is Frontier
(Southern)

Asva's 2005 debut, Futurists Against the Ocean, is a monumental doom-metal opus that achieves a kind of oppressive catharsis. Even as you feel crushed by its down-tuned pressure and tumescent chord avalanches, it's inducing an ultimately beneficial form of suffering. The feeling is akin to thrusting your arms skyward while lying on the ocean floor, and also like staring into the abyss and accepting—even embracing—the nothingness that is your destiny. Similar to what happens with those early Earth and Sleep records, you emerge from it at the end a stronger individual.

Like its predecessor, the Seattle quintet's new full-length, What You Don't Know Is Frontier, isn't for the ADD sufferer; it contains four tracks clocking in at around 69 minutes (weighty things come to those who are good). A forlorn majesty permeates the disc. The album title—which sounds like a line from a Flannery O'Connor story—is actually from a poem written by Asva leader G. Stuart Dahlquist's brother Michael, the Silkworm drummer who tragically died in a car crash in 2005 at age 39. Stuart admits that Frontier is largely colored by a profound sense of loss over his late brother.

The title track is built upon a base of toxic guitar/bass sludge with Troy Swanson's perilous organ drone. Elongated wah-wah-ed guitar plaints sporadically flare up from the subdued, fateful morass, offering relief from the slow-motion anguish. "A Game in Hell, Hard Work in Heaven" evokes stoic gothic doom via Holly Johnston's plaintive, Sinéad O'Connor–esque vocals and a main melody that alludes to David Bowie's "Warszawa" (which itself was based on the Polish Silesian song "Helokanie"), before greatly accelerating around minute 13, as a soaring wordless chorale contributes to an exalted climax.

Frontier concludes with "A Trap for Judges," a marathon slugfest with what sounds like an ornate cathedral organ swelling triumphantly behind the granite cascades of guitar and bass. It harks back to early Swans' suffocating heaviness and grim hardship before sprouting a gently wavering organ whorl that provides a heavenly shaft of light after an hour of infernal darkness.

Asva perform Fri Jan 9, King Cobra, 9 pm, 21+. With Trees, Iron Lung, and Pig Heart Transplant.