FLOATING

There are definitely too few hours in a day to fully appreciate all the great things that are happening in underground metal, but we can always try. FLOATING are a duo from Uppsala, Sweden, with a sound that brings together the dark, post-punk clangor of FIELDS OF THE NEPHILIM and their dusty ilk, with the grotesque churn of left-field and progressive death metal. In some ways, this is a hybrid that has plenty of precedent, but the Swedes have taken a combination of gothic rock and death metal and conjured something from it that feels entirely new. The willful obscurity of FLOATING's "The Waves Have Teeth" debut has given way to a more approachable blurring of genre boundaries on the follow-up. Still raw, ugly and occasionally impenetrable, "Hesitating Lights" is also a much more refined record than its predecessor. This is its creators' coming of age.

This is one for the goths. FLOATING inhabit that shadowy zone between the horrifying and surrealism, where creepiness is a way of life, and guitars are strung with razor-wire. The duo's death metal chops are unquestionable: these songs are dominated by old-school churn and the clatter of ragged blastbeats. But at the meeting point between all that barbarity, and the insidious, haunting guitar lines that will hurl listeners back to the grubby '80s goth scene: well, that's where the magic happens. "I Reached The Mew" heralds the blossoming of the Swedes' sound, with a distinctly NEPHILIM-like goth rock canter, interspersed with hammer-attack blasts and the promise of chaos. Similarly, "Grave Dog" strikes the perfect balance between cudgeling, VOIVOD-tinged aggression, skulking, noise rock slurry, and scowling, post-punk with one foot in the eerie '80s. As if to confirm the efficacy of the whole thing, more epic tracks dig deeper into goth's nimble-footed, pop-adjacent golden period, with brittle shards of THE CURE and MARCH VIOLETS rearing ugly heads in the glacial fury of "Cough Choir" and amid the ambling menace of "Hesitating Lights / Harmless Fires", with its viscous synths, sleepy guitars and eventual descent into clattering, psychedelic black metal nihilism. The previously released "Still Dark Enough" is the obvious hit here: a pitch-black throwback to birth of gothic rock, but fed through death metal's dense, violent fog, it has woozy melancholy etched into its DNA.

Only the closing "The Waking" points, albeit briefly, to a more traditional, death metal palate, but even then no single riff is ever allowed to get comfortable. As it winds towards a droning, maxed-out denouement, it spins away on wild tangents, with blastbeats that envelop rather than repel, and giant, windswept melodies that hint at serenity and sanctuary from the preceding madness.

Having said all that it needs to say, "Hesitating Lights" bows out after 35 minutes, leaving a strong sense that FLOATING have arrived here by accident. Intuitive rather than calculated, this is the sound of the darkness finding a new way to penetrate the light. "Hesitating Lights" is as weird and wonderful as it wants to be.