Harbored Mantras

Harbored Mantras is the best goth album of the decade. No, I don't mean the tired, cripple thing goth has become; Water Borders make goth music as it might have evolved if it wasn't for goths: a sleek combination of brooding post-punk and industrial entwined with elements of tribal world music, UK Garage, house, hip-hop and post-dubstep production. It's a sound that shows reverence to influences while staying firmly Now: dark, clever and razor-sharp. 'Tread On Them' opens with echoing windchimes, a buzzsaw synth and Amitai Heller's menacing vocals stalking behind a pounding gamelan warbeat. The drums pummel mercilessly as Amitai's smokey baritone seduces the ears like a gentlemen pimp from the seventh circle. 'What Wiwant' is more subtle, shimmying serpentlike down synthline spines that chime like bone. The vocals dart in and out, rivaling the most ghastly of wails from forebears like the Virgin Prunes. 'waldenpond.com' is a codeine syrup hallucination, screwed R&B croons lurching as Group Rhoda provides some ghostly refracted vocals which throb into the pulsating scream of 'Bad Ethos'. 'Even In The Dark' should be an anthemic cut for any aspiring weirdo, crooning shrieks and medieval chants over pounding techno drums.

The heavy toms and warbling, pitch-shifted mid-Eastern wails of 'Feasting On Mongeese' are the perfect backdrop to Amitai's signature voice; you wouldn't think a line like 'the dregs from the juicebox' would have so much depth, but Water Borders have now shown that they do depth effortlessly. The hollow ghost-folk of 'Seed Bank' sounds like Purgatory, the body falling in a grey twinkling space that pulses like a heartbeat, surrounded by the voices of lost souls while Amitai's downpitched vocals drone about 'the sunny side of me'. It's a lullabye from hell that alternately soothes and discomfits. Nowhere is the duo's love of Jhonn Balance more obvious than in the broken-down march of 'Antechamber'. The finale of the LP could be a lost track from Horse Rotorvator, its wobbling voices, dense drums and crystallized synths creating an atmosphere of claustrophobic paranoia.

Harbored Mantras is an album that sounds disturbing, evil, dark, and a hundred other similar-meaning words, but at no time does it feel dreary. On the contrary, the myriad sounds on this LP sparkle with a richness that defies the lo-fi feeling of the production. It's an album that hypnotizes, and it's also one of the most rewarding things you'll hear all year.