XENONAUT ‘IN CAELUM’
On September 4th, the Cambridge, UK trio Xenonaut released their debut album In Caelum, an instrumental work that mines post-rock, post-metal, “beard metal,” and more to craft an LP that invites the listener to deliberately consider its contents. This is a record that asks for—and rewards—sustained attention.
We live in a system that wants us to have the attention spans of goldfish, to treat everything as a consumable, reducing art to commodity and—whether it be fast fashion, pre-fab corporatized music, or movie franchise re-boot/sequel/whatever number five hundred—ultimately disposable. There’s a familiar conceptual framework that places artistic purity at one end of a spectrum and commercialism at the other, and though there’s a lot of nuance here and to really unpack it requires a full article in and of itself at minimum, at the risk of being too reductive here my point here is that music such as Xenonaut’s strikes me as far to the artistic purity end of the spectrum, art for its own sake. In Caelum exists because the artists who created it felt that it had to. Born, such as it was, from genuine feeling and human artistry, I’m reminded of the closing lines of Sonnet One of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella:
But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows;
And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.”
In Caelum requires patience and the ability to give it the space it needs, which in turn yields deeper and richer joys of discovery. The best post-rock and post-metal albums—really the best albums, period—take you on a journey. In Caelum does that. It’s a journey that, as I wrote about Din of Celestial Birds’ Takeoffs & Landings, “takes one at once to places both beyond and deep within oneself.”
“Untethered/Adrift” feels like being a solitary figure in the high desert at night with the vast expanse of the cosmos arrayed in the firmament above, capturing that sense of awe and wonder, and both the significance of moment and the insignificance of the individual in the grand scheme of things. “Laïka” takes the listener to an astral plane and the synths of “Shedding Sun” accomplish something similar; the latter’s cinematic opening sounds like some leviathan emerging from the deep. “Mnemosyne” is a study in contrasts between this big, burly riff and some of the record’s most quietly beautiful passages. Elsewhere the band oscillates between more spacious post-rock and Mastodon-influenced guitarwork. It’s an interesting record that’s definitely worth checking out, sitting with, and letting transport you within and beyond yourself.
