The Black Bile is a strange album. I've sat here having just listened to the 16-track epic in its entirety for a few minutes wondering what it is I want to say about it, and more importantly, where to start, and but starting points keep slipping out of my hands. So I'll start by saying that it's a strange album.
It's an album that can be very easily split up into two halves. The first proper track, Snow, opens with a gloomy and minimal techno beat, while guest vocalist Joan Silentio sings even gloomier lyrics. In all honesty, the lyrics feel like they're mostly adding texture to the track than much lyrical meaning, but they work and her voice is great. As the track progresses, that four-to-the-floor beat morphs into a breakbeat while bass synths and heavily distorted guitars wail in the distance, and you enter a kind of trance. It sets the tone for how that first half of the album is going to go. Moody and electronic and driven by some pretty fantastic beats.
That starts to shift with Sigh, the sixth track and my personal favourite, where it almost feels like Got.Knees themselves is stepping out of the shadow. Where everything up until now has more or less been an instrumental, this is is a song lamenting humdrum mundanity in a manner that almost sounds like it could have been a b-side for Radiohead's The Bends. The chord shifts during the half-mumbled chorus of "Take your medicine" add so much weight to the lyrics, and it feels like a real centrepiece for the album.
Once the album passes its second interlude, The Black Bile (Part II), there's a fairly noticeable shift. Looking over the Bandcamp page, I realised that where the first half was mostly instrumental, every song from here on would have lyrics. My Head replaces the synths with warm and lo-fi acoustic guitars.
I really like some of these songs. Well, in particular, exists in a particularly dark place and is all the better for it. And then by contrast, there's the dreamy Thunder, which sounds like it was taken directly from This Mortal Coil's It'll End In Tears.
That said, this second half isn't, to my ears, the stronger of the two sides. As much as I enjoy these songs in isolation, there's something slightly exhausting about listening to them all together after the more minimal first half. That's not to say I think anything should have been cut, I almost think that the exhaustion is part of the experience, and it's one of the more interesting albums I've heard recently as a result.