“Banks Of Nowhere is the place that signifies both arrival and departure, familiar and alien, home and far from home,” says multi-instrumentalist Zak Koehn, one half of Milwaukee experimental rock duo Mute Gospel. “You’re there, but ‘there’ is wrong. It’s that station in life where you really start to dredge everything up and ask if the sum of it all should’ve added up to where you are now only to realize that it isn’t.”
That sums up the vibe of the group’s second offering, due out Tuesday, October 28 on Bandcamp, with physical releases potentially to follow down the road. The band formed around 10 years ago as an offshoot of progressive metal trio Arbor, which had released a couple albums and played shows around town for several years. “As that group dissipated, the material became Mute Gospel,” says drummer/vocalist Noel Chandek. “Zak and I have been playing music together now for around 15 years, so it makes sense we’d end up doing a collaborative project like this that’s kind of genre-defying and has a mix of writing meets improvisation.”
Both artists have a long history in extreme metal, going back to their MySpace days with the caustic black/death/crust assault of Never Ending Circle (disbanded in 2011). Readers may also recognize Chandek’s name from projects like Uhtcearu and Acanthrophis, as well as his non-metal work in Painted Caves. Mute Gospel’s 2019 debut In Reach retained some of the guttural riffage of the pair’s past projects while expanding into more melodic realms, resulting in a wide-ranging album of instrumental prog. “Mute Gospel has always been a place for the two of us to experiment and look for a lane where both of us could feel comfortable trying new things and just sort of see what happens,” says Koehn.
For followup album Banks Of Nowhere, “new things” included lyrics and singing, with both members contributing. “By no means was the plan to record these vocals ourselves,” Koehn insists, “but after taking a number of losses in trying to recruit, we decided it was best to let our ideas materialize in our own voices, and we spent several extra months working through that part of the composition to make sure that the right feeling and message came through in the end.”
In general, the vocals add to an overall enhanced psychedelic edge to the album; often filtered through effects, Koehn and Chandek’s harmonies are effective throughout. Although the opening track, “Lizard Men,” suggests a concept album initially, it doesn’t specifically play out that way. Themes of human disconnection, however, run through most of the songs, enhanced by sometimes sudden shifts between soft tension and frantic motion in the music itself.
While Mute Gospel have incorporated a broader range of styles than ever before, the songs themselves are more focused, bringing to mind the classic early-2000s era of Porcupine Tree at times, harkening back to mid-’70s Pink Floyd as well as incorporating more modern electronic elements without ever sounding cluttered. Even the 12-minute closer “Concession Symphony” flies by, bringing thematic closure to the album’s title in whatever sense one may choose to think of it. Without getting overtly political, the song is a pointed expression of the ideological gulf that exists in our current social climate, but its lyrics can also be taken in a more personal sense. Either way, while the album may not end on an emotional high note, it’s a powerful statement nonetheless, evocative of the struggles the country and the world have wrestled with since the COVID-19 pandemic, when the two started working on this material.
“It’s been a wild five years, full of personal and global change,” says Chandek, “and we think the music reflects on some of the chaos, friction, perseverance, and the delicate balance of hopelessness and belief, that we’ve all experienced in that timeframe.”
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