At the Heart of the World - Inosculate

At the Heart of the World has been a staple on my playlists since I’ve discovered them last year. “Sorrow Uncoils” only began my journey with the project and I went on to buy the rest of their discography. I did some soul-searching and found that my favorite of their releases thus far is their album “Reaching Perfection, Tasting Death”. I cannot tell you how many times this album has fueled my workouts as my face turned beat-red and I struggled to lift things up and put them down. Nonetheless, when I saw in my Bandcamp notification feed that they released a new EP I was all over it, gobbling it up. What I received was an EP containing three new tracks with a couple of new surprises, as well as remixed / remastered tracks from their “Sorrow Uncoils” sessions that had me polarized. 

The EP starts off with ‘Retroject’, a three-and-a-half-minute trudge through some sludgy, dark electronic mechanics. What’s different this time around is that, in addition to their wonderful yet menacing shouts, At the Heart of the World also uses clean vocals. More or less used in elongated form, these vocals sound more like an additional instrument than they do as vocals. I love how easily they’re able to transition from the clean vox to the shouting, such as around the two-minute and fourteen-second mark. It’s quite remarkable. ‘Synchrony’ continues our dive into dark and grim industrial electronics. At this point I expect nothing less from At the Heart of the World. I love the use of the kickdrum on the album as it somewhat beckons back to “Reaching Perfection, Tasting Death”. I feel as if At the Heart of the World channeled some Skinny Puppy into their music for ‘Etheric Visions’. It’s a electro-industrial beast, if more rugged than what’s normal for the genre. Yet the amount of wonky electronics and experimentation beckons to the genre. I even found myself reminiscing some of ohGr’s vocals from his sessions on “Weapon” from what I heard on “Inosculate”. Whatever they did on this track is amazing and I approve. 

Now, here’s where things get a little tricky. The next four songs are new iterations of tracks that appeared on At the Heart of the World’s “Sorrow Uncoils” EP. ‘Pain Demands Attention’, ‘Multiply The Stillness’, ‘Reflect/Reveal’, and ‘Mocked By Death’ all have their origin on the 2021 EP. What I appreciate about each of these songs is that they are musically enhanced; the tracks boom and pop a lot louder. I believe they both remixed and remastered the songs so each sound has new life. However, what I don’t appreciate about the new versions are the shout being replaced by clean vocals. Take ‘Multiply The Stillness’ for example. The clean vocals in the beginning of the song sound way too nonchalant and quiet for the overall mood of the track. Now, on the original version, the vocals were all shouts. It dribbled nicely with the tone and mood of the song and really got the aggression going. The same can be said for the rest of the tracks. The new versions are musically superior, but vocally inferior. They aren’t bad by any means necessary, but they have their flaws. 

“Inosculate” is still a good EP despite my complaints written in the previous paragraph. Should I have been handed ‘Retroject’, ‘Synchrony’, and ‘Etheric Visions’ by themselves without the revised tracks from “Sorrow Uncoils”, I probably would have rated this at an eight or higher. Be that as it may, I did receive those songs. And while the intention was great, I wish they would have left the vocals as they were simply because the new, cleaner vocals don’t fit all that well within them. The music is great, vocals not so much. On the trilogy of brand new tracks do the shouting and clean vocals mix wonderfully as they were made to be that way. The “Sorrow Uncoils” tracks were not. Nonetheless, despite my bitching, I still had an overall decent time with “Inosculate”. It’s held back some because of the issues noted above, but it’s still a respectable addition to At the Heart of the World’s discography. Seven out of ten.