CRUSTCAKE PICKS - NEW CAKE IN THE OVEN: COALESCE'S OXEP

By The WZA'd (ATX)

Download: Coalesce - "Through Sparrows I Rest" [MP3]

Earlier this year, Coalesce came back into our collective consciousness like some phantom-of-the-hardcore-opera and proceeded to capture our hearts with the incredible Ox. The album was largely a return to form, with instrumental "Americana" interludes that opened up their dense, noisy hardcore and gave the band a new aesthetic.

November's OXEP, a companion EP to Ox, finds Coalesce exploring that aspect of their music more fully. "Through Sparrows I Rest" is a dirge-y, trudging beast of a song that takes one of the interludes on Ox and adds a flatbed-load of heavy. "Absent in My Death" begins with soft Morricone-esque guitar before the bass kicks in, but the yelling passes almost as soon as it starts, leaving the listener feeling like something important happened, just out of reach.

Crustcake caught up with guitarist Jes Steineger to ask a few questions about Coalesce's change in direction on their latest EP and the meaning of Americana to him.

"I’ve always thought of Coalesce as having two aspects that make it what it is: the complex dimension of our friendships with one another and the feeling of freedom we derive from playing the songs live," Steineger said. "Nothing about OXEP subverts those two aspects of what Coalesce is. It serves the exact same ends."

Steineger takes a philosophical viewpoint on their live shows, comparing them to "Pentecostal and Charismatic frenzies or shamanistic New Orleans voodoo practices," saying that "it all ultimately trades in rationality for emotion and that’s what I find in the kind of Americana I think Coalesce constitutes."

But what about this Americana concept? Steineger's explanation was, unsurprisingly, romantic as it was practical. "It captures a few sentiments I have about my earliest past, the sorts of family gatherings I grew up with in the country, the smell of diesel fuel and dirt from my family’s farm, a sense of identity that wasn’t abstract and intellectual but concrete and immediate. The musical dimension of Americana is really just the significance of self-identity that one assigns to the types of music that have come from American culture."

Sidestepping the touchy subject of American colonization and indigenous subjugation, Steineger instead mentioned he thinks of Americana as "that perspective which identifies some cultural artifact, in this case music, within the heritage of one of those American [subsets that make up the American working class]. Coalesce is surely such an artifact, one that is specifically identifiable by its Midwestern character."

We're glad they are, as OXEP is a fantastic 16-minute coda to one of the year's best albums, bar none.

Buy Coalesce - OXEP [here]