Album: Systems - Ghost Medicine

Band: Systems
Album: Ghost Medicine
Label: Unsigned
Year: 2011









Tracklist
01. I. Procession
02. II. Healing Tides
03. III. Witch Ritual
04. IV. Burial
0V. Ghost Medicine (tetradymia canescens)
06. VI. Datura Hallowing
07. VII. Visionary
08. VIII. Unveiled by the Fall
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Systems is a band from Carrboro, North Carolina that plays primarily hardcore-, and metal-, and post-rock-influenced music. One of the premises for the band’s songwriting is the description of certain scenes. For example, the band has played music representative of the winter solstice and season, spring equinox, and desert. Each of these scenes is composed of smaller, isolated scenes.

At the core of Systems' brilliance, at least on the Carrboro band's debut, is the band's ability to navigate the uneven line between thrash and post-rock. Here, these two disparate styles cooperate within a churning, nuanced soundscape, where thrash elements take on a cinematic, lonesome beauty. Post-rock has rarely sounded so rightfully oppressive.

As such, Ghost Medicine is one complex document, an anxiety-inducing and supremely dark album about the inevitability and totality of death. In these 41 minutes, brief periods of soaring triumph only make the general state of cathartic terror that much heavier. It all starts gently enough, with an ambient invocation familiar to fans of Mono or Explosions in the Sky. The band subverts the slow-blooming form by replacing familiar, euphoric post-rock tones with nervy, diminished chords. "Now our ship will sink," Cameron Zarrabzadeh rasps in a shriek that approximates black metal. Subsequently, the record gets obsessively heavy and mean.

For Ian Creath and Drew Wallace/ continued dosing/ of one sacred root," Zarrabzadeh screams as the music hits its turbulent crescendo during "Datura Hallowing." "Until I'm through/ coughing up and learning/ from their ghosts." Both Ghost Medicine and Datura Hallowing are names for southwestern plants: the former is used in native medicine to help deal with loss, while the latter is a dangerous natural hallucinogen. Through this lens, the opening chant of "datura/ datura" takes on new menace and meaning, as if the fatal drug itself is calling its new victim.

Is this post-thrash? Systems draw from all over the heavy spectrum to create a sound that has the space and atmosphere of a Neurot band but an immediacy that indicates a background in hardcore. Ghost Medicine, the juggernaut full-length to be released this summer, pits harsh black metal roars against haunted baritone countermelodies, all atop a tempest of doom and death metal that threatens to drop the floor out with its bassy heft.

Systems carry this dark catharsis to the end. Closer "Unveiled by the Fall" approaches epic release and perhaps redemptive resolution. A Red Sparowes-style progression marches toward an implied conclusion, but it's repeatedly interrupted by guttural screams and bass-heavy, math-metal churn. Midway through one of these parts, the song and album simply stop. For a record about death and grief, it's a fitting, devastating end.

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