Floating : Hesitating Lights
I could put my finger on some of my touchpoints for Hesitating Lights right away. Ah, that combination of post-punk’s driving, bass-led grooves with wide-open reverbed guitars: that’s Tribulation! Ah, but that particular turn, the lean into the more gothic and macabre elements—that’s In Solitude! Oh, here is a little bit of Tombs I think. Et cetera, et cetera. Noting that this combination of post-punk and quite grimy traditional death metal reminded me of was quite easy. What I struggled with over several passes though was articulating this lingering sense of difference. Because Floating doesn’t make records that feel like those ones do. Tribulation invokes a kind of ravenous and quite mystical death worship that is euphoric. In Solitude plumbs the opposite ends, making something that feels harrowed and on the precipice of the annihilating abyss of death in its mysticism. Floating, meanwhile, open this record with a set of chords that felt almost like Gang of Four or maybe one of the later groups inspired by post-punk like the Stone Roses, who offer a great deal of heft and rock power behind similar sonic ideas. The vocals were, of course, nasty and feral, feeling vomitous in the excellent way we who love death metal crave. But naming the assemblage escaped me.
The eight tracks here balance approaches between more obvious melodic or brutal progressions with some chord choices that feel quite alien. The progressive influence seems to come in largely in that affective terrain, striving to make a record that isn’t quite so immediately placable within an emotional terrain. There doesn’t seem to be any mysticism afoot here; the synths feel at once too VHS B-movie coded and on the other quite science fictional in a way that undercuts a sense of sulfurous evil magick or the like. And yet everything from the name of the group to the title of the record as well as that spell-binding cover art invoke this eerie sense of the world. Look at the track titles: “Exit Bag Song,” “Grave Dog,” “The Wrong Body.” Some touch on a recognizable mysticism kin to this sort of abstracted death metal, but most of these names, like the sounds in them, feel almost more like the inverted noir storytelling in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy or the way Chinatown gave birth to Blue Velvet in all its alien, unspeakable glory. There is a line in one of the songs: “Bury the witch and cover the body in saliva,” or something near that, given the way death metal growls distort legibility. That image catches me over and over as I play the record, no matter the song. There is a deep sense of wrongness there, a mutant sense of justice played out against a mutant form of the body where both permutations fail to meet each other.
That they cite, among other groups, Demilich and Defect Designer, I believe elaborates the spiritual center of what Floating does quite well, even if the musical citation of Siouxsie explicates a lot of the sounds much better. Like those two progressive and avant-garde death metal groups, Floating here is doing something adventurous and full of risk. This record would land better, certainly, if it choked its ambitions toward something more immediately recognizable on the emotional front, whether that’s being harrowing and bleak or wild-eyed and star-speckled or brutal and pummeling or anything of the sort. Likewise, it would land better for many if the ambitions shot straight out into the world of progressive epics and interpolations of noise, industrial music, electronica, dub, and all the other hallmarks of the epic, for lack of a better term. This does something subtler, something weirder. It is precisely because these songs feel so nearly like normal songs that they burrow into the brain. Floating aren’t looking to play a different game than the rest like, say, a group like ATVM. Instead, closer perhaps to Voivod, the key figures in the world of metal for this notion, they want the existing game to become weirder, more alien, to make shocking choices that are taken up into the body rather than kept sequestered to the outer limits.
Hesitating Lights is a fascinating record, one that’s quite hard for me even ten listens in to make heads or tails of in terms of its emotional terrain. That’s exciting to someone like me. I don’t seek to punish music I can figure out quite quickly but years and decades of this kind of idiosyncratic obsession with an art form does tend to make things a lot easier to parse over time. That a group can combine sounds I know and love in a form that isn’t even radically far from what I know but provide me with such a stalwart emotional puzzle is deeply fascinating to me. Like the group Emptiness before them, they are approaching a vacuum where they can etch their own thoughts into virgin marble. Hesitating Lights doesn’t feel like the defining document in that pursuit, but it certainly feels one solid step closer.
Label: Transcending Obscurity
Year: 2025
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