Out of Louisville, KY, Sapat have been around and shifting shape for 14 years as a noise-bending collective that explores the bounds of art rock, psychedelia, noise, and narrative. Unfazed by convention, they’ve taken their time over the years. Their debut LP was 2007’s Mortise and Tenon, and now they’ll be following it up with the mystically, saucily titled full-length A Posthuman Guide to the Advent Calendar Origins of the Peep Show.
The last track on the record, “Rock Face”, simmers in comparison to Sapat’s harder, faster, more overtly noisy tunes. It’s a slower jam that takes its inspiration from the natural world and certainly feels closely bound with it. Starting out as a soft ambient trickle, it undergoes an organic evolution from a weighted, darkly perplexing monologue amid forest sounds into one steady, incessant riff that burns as it moves alongside low and steaming vocals that wander and search through the field of sound. All of this is dipped in and out of an intense, whirling synthetic fog that imbues it with a jarring muffle. The track garners emotional intensity, quietly—it’s the introduction of simple descending key patterns around the guitar riff and softened vocals that drives it to a point of near-breakage. Once we’re at the height of melancholic feeling, the instrumentation is replaced by a wall of sound like driving over an amplified singing bridge, and then we’re left with the ambient residue of it all, panning from ear to ear in the wake of the fire.
A Posthuman Guide to the Advent Calendar Origins of the Peep Show will be out tomorrow, November 25 via Sophomore Lounge Records.
