SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: AUGUST – HEAVEN’S GATE

August
Heaven’s Gate
Independent

Basing your music on philosopher’s ideas can not only be a tricky thing, but very often, quite indulgent and overbearing, and if that philosopher is Georges Bataille, whose main ideas revolve around physical experience as transcendence as well as the extreme conditions of nature, you can certainly run into trouble.

Yet, this seems to be nothing to deter Anacortes, WA songwriter August Eliason (or simply August) who based most of his work so far on Bataille’s philosophical ideas, and that includes his latest release, Heaven’s Gate.

Still, no matter how tricky the hurdles Eliason placed in front of him to be able to come up with some meaningful and at the same time listenable music, he and his collaborator Jorgen Lovehart (both on vocals and a multitude of different instruments) actually manage to do exactly that with this hushed set of vocal post-rock material, that ranges anywhere from Bark Psychosis to Leonard Cohen and back, often with quite intriguing effect.

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