27 Jan 2021 // A review by Callum Wagstaff
Magnalith is the brain child of Mathew Bosher (Decortica, Domes). Intimacy's End is a two-and-a-half minute monster mixed by Dave Holmes (Jakob, Saint Agnes, Maisha).
Bosher recorded pieces of the track in a ballroom, a former food processing plant and even a 500-tonne lightship.
The pair might have identified something special about recording on boats, since in the past they've also recorded on a moored heritage ship.

Going above and beyond in search for unique rooms has served them in more than just kooky recording stories. Intimacy's End is absolutely transfixing. To give you an idea, here's what I wrote to myself in my notes after the first couple of times I listened:

"I can barely focus my brain enough to process what I'm experiencing into words and articulate what I like about it, there's so much going on that my frontal lobe is getting overridden every time I listen to it. I'll have to really hammer it till it starts to get boring enough that I can focus my thoughts into what I'm actually hearing rather than just feeling it."

Coming to grips with the song, I was reminded of the soaring theatrics of Devin Townsend accompanied in certain areas by the skewed perspectives of Danny Elfman, the emotive expression of A Perfect Circle, the cold piano tone of The Exorcist theme song, and some of the modal mixtures favoured by Muse, all over a sonic setting that felt like something out of Dune.

It's so edifying to get to listen to a short prog track. All those juicy changes and sonic railroading genre tangents condensed into an experience even my burnt out attention span can't turn away from for a second of its run time. Keep an eye out for the full EP coming out in April.

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆ ( 5 / 5 )

Magnalith is dense but concise, expressionistic but corporeal music. Tangentially metal, curiously harmonic. Unbridled structural deviations see handbrake slides into weird, cinematic passages that lurch back into leviathan riffs.

The second EP, Oblivion (out 5 May) builds out the fantastical but humanistic atmosphere of the debut, Instrumentality. The hallmarks of experimental vignettes, conceptual lyricism, pathos and sagacious mixing remain. The new release accelerates the heavy, harmonic and cerebral qualities that capture the imagination of post-metal, prog and hard rock fans.

For songwriter Mathew Bosher, the first single, Sympathy, represents a return to music. Production of the EP was interrupted by the premature birth of his son; a welcome but harrowing arrival. Bosher spent a day in the recording studio, then a hundred in the neonatal intensive care unit with his family. He stopped listening to music for the first few weeks of his son’s care, recognising that any songs would be imbued with his family's trauma. Now the little one is thriving. Completing the recordings was a kind of celebration of the urgent and irrepressible creative force.

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