Dan Meyer recently released his first solo project, “Kneeling,” under the independent dark music record label The Flenser. This album has a massive sound, stripped-back songwriting, and complimentary lo-fi production that give it all kinds of rough edges and charms.
Meyer is the guitarist for Agriculture, which has made waves with its fresh and exciting take on a genre they call “ecstatic black metal.”
Agriculture is known for shrieked vocals and fast-paced, precise drum and guitar execution. This creates an experimental, loud and breathtaking sound. The heavy riffs are dizzying, and the vocals sound almost inhuman. Yet it all comes together into a cohesive and, as they claim, “ecstatic” performance.
With this solo album, Dan Meyer departs from Agriculture’s typical sound. The project was recorded in his bedroom on a vintage Tascam 4-track tape recorder and then transferred onto his computer.
Meyer described his process in a recent interview with Brooklyn Vegan: “I wanted these songs to sound like huge piles—big leafy piles that you could just jump into. I wasn’t worried about fidelity and actually wanted weird audio artifacts to pop up from all the layering. My rule was just to record everything as many times as I could before I had to get up to stretch or pee or whatever. I kept a lot of bad takes in the mixes too … I just wanted them to sound huge and small at the same time.”
All these weird audio artifacts give the record a unique sound as it progresses through two movements.
The first section contains songs Meyer refers to as “thick indie rock.”
On the first two tracks, “Ugly Man” and “16 Angels,” layered guitars wash over the listener as Meyer sings softly in the background. The lyrics and instruments mesh together into a wall of sound. The two are so tightly interwoven that the voice just becomes another texture.
The third track, “Omen,” uses similar guitar work while Meyer imagines the end of the world with just him and his beloved dog, Shiloh, who also stars in the music video for the song. “Sacrificing a Calf” uses imagery lifted straight from Leviticus to describe the ritual of animal sacrifice.
The record’s second half departs from rock and leans into black metal. This movement is without lyrics and ambient. Meyer improvises screams and shouts that are layered into the walls of noise.
This section is gorgeous. The guitars are deafening and constant, and Meyer’s shrieks dig at some itch that can’t be scratched through typical melodies.
As someone who enjoys these genres and noisy walls of sound, I naturally loved this record. However, I think it has much to offer everyone, even non-ecstatic black metal fans wary of loud screeches.
The album is messy. I don’t mean it’s “a mess,” like critics say when they believe a work of art is all over the place. I mean, it sounds mucky. The lyrics are difficult to decipher, which is intentional. That’s part of the joy of making and listening to low-fidelity music.
We can be too fixated on everything around us making sense. We all have a drive in us for life to “click” and all work out. It calms us down. It makes us breathe a sigh of relief when all the pieces slide right into place.
For me, much of the past decade has been about finding beauty in the midst of things I can’t explain. I am discovering the beauty inside of and in spite of the stuff that won’t click into place.
After the 2016 presidential election, my nice, neat, Christian world was utterly crushed, just as it was for many others. I was in the eighth grade, when every emotion and thought felt like it was getting churned through a trash compactor.
To get to whatever my faith is now, I had to grow. The first step was discarding the nice, simple answers that didn’t make sense in light of what I was learning about the Church, what it supported, and the violence and hatred America was founded on.
One of the many things that has continued to sustain me is works of art that exist amid all that mess–that scratch and claw around in the muck in the hope that, one day, things will be redeemed.
This yearning is not always explicit, but it undergirds the beauty and joy with which I hope I am living my life.
Great art is a way of making sense of these feelings that can’t be put into words. They are better expressed with a wail and a scream than with good prose.
“Kneeling” is beautiful in the way that only messy things can be. Meyer eschews the precise soaring melodies of Agriculture for scattered, layered guitars and crashing cymbals. Slow, sludgy strums create a sound that requires you to close your eyes and let the clutter wash over you.
“Kneeling” reminds us that beauty is not just for the clean and put together. We can find beauty in the muck, the filth and the dissonance.
Beauty doesn’t require clear meaning or precision. It can be felt deep in your chest. “Kneeling” has that kind of beauty: sensed, wordless, vibrating beauty we could all use more of.
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Samuel Shepley is currently a junior at the University of Belmont. He is double majoring in English and Faith and Social Justice.
