Ceremony - Safranin Sounds

Ceremony is an inordinately dark and brooding electro rock duo that formed from the ashes of lauded late nineties / early noughties band Skywave. While fellow band member Oliver Ackermann went off to create A Place To Bury Strangers, Paul Baker and John Fedowitz set off on their own distinct and very much lo-fi path with Ceremony.

‘Safranin Sounds’ is their third album and it is a great big hulking mass of shoegaze influenced guitars and an almost relentless industrial electro pulse. It is a measure of the band’s ambition that the album runs to twenty tracks in length; the scale and scope of their sound is ramped up to the maximum levels throughout.

Ceremony’s sound is characterised by darkness and the blank and expressionless vocals of Paul Baker are a perfect accompaniment for these doleful and at times lyrically harrowing songs. Opening track ‘Dull Life’ sees Baker intoning menacingly, “I love things falling apart.” The theme of hopelessness and an almost macabre sense of the bleak and portentous carries on throughout with innumerable references to death and despair. The constant horror of the lyrics reaches an almost cringe worthy level of parody at times that does much to dilute the overall power; for example, ‘Future’’s opening line “I’ve seen the future and the future is shit.” Profound indeed.

Musically ‘Safranin Sounds’ alternates between a highly reverential Jesus & Mary Chain wash of ragged guitar and a lo-fi take on early 80s electro. Think Depeche Mode and New Order as very obvious reference points. There is a nagging sense however that these immediate references contribute to a regressive and rather outdated sound. A number of the tracks here could have come straight off ‘Psychocandy’.

There are moments though when ’Safranin Sounds’ thrills. ’Without Your Love’ is a powerful piece of driving industrial rock which degenerates into a glorious cacophony of discordant sound. ’Cold, Cold Night’ is one of the album’s few lighter moments and it is a truly lovely piece of twinkling synth pop; a welcome beam of light in a record that is mostly caught under a forbidding cloud.

There is no doubt that ’Safranin Sounds’ main fault is its length. Twenty tracks is a challenge for even the most ardent listener, and at times the album becomes interminably turgid. It would have been far better to cut it in half and capture the invigorating power of its most stirring moments. It’s is a challenging listen but in the right situation and environment, ideally a dark and windswept night it is an album that can provide sporadic succour.