Band:	Fawn Limbs / Nadja
Album:	Vestigial Spectra [Collaboration]
Style:	Mathcore, Grindcore
Release date:	November 24, 2023
A review by:	RaduP

01. Isomerisch
02. Black Body Radiation Curve
03. Cascading Entropy
04. Redshifted
05. Blueshifted
06. Distilled In Observance
07. Metastable Ion Decay

Among the myriad of collaborative albums this year, I didn't expect to hear one between a mathcore outfit and a drone doom one.

I am lucky enough to approach Vestigial Spectra as a prior fan of both bands. Even though out of the two Fawn Limbs is the one I reviewed previously, it's still Nadja that I feel a stronger connection to, maybe because I have known them for longer, seen them live, and with their expansive discography, it is with them that I had the opportunity to encounter their music more often than Fawn Limbs'. I am a bit disappointed that I didn't get myself to review a Nadja album until now, even if I had plenty of opportunities, and even this review was one that was passed unto me by a reviewer whose PC died at an inopportune moment. Well, what a better time to start than now, in the last day of the year?

I was a bit spoiled about the existence of this album through Apothecary's interview with Nadja's Aidan Baker, and even with having learned about it so far ago, and having listened to it multiple times, I'm still quite baffled about its existence purely because of how contradictory the two bands' styles are. Drone and mathcore can both inject a bit of sludge into their sound, drone when it picks up the pace and mathcore when it slows things down, and that's the one common element you'd expect to find as a meeting ground between the two bands, but there's still something about Vestigial Spectra that seems impossible even if purely in concept. But the more I think about both bands' trajectories, the more the album makes sense.

Nadja have had quite a penchant for collaborations and for trying to do something different every time even with such a large catalogue. Moving things into heavier territories than their usual drone doom, from the self-described "grindgaze" Tangled EP to the versatility of the guest vocalists on Labyrinthine (the one Nadja album I really regret not having reviewed) to how adding a drummer on Nalepa turned the drone on its head. Nadja using their texturing and atmosphere building to aid another band's sound as well as to craft droning behemoths alongside it does sound like something the duo would be capable of doing.

Fawn Limbs' mathcore started out from having its intensity focused on the shorter and faster side, with something whose density rivaled that of a Frontierer record, which makes sense considering the involvement of that band's members in Fawn Limbs' Sleeper Vessels. The evolution from that record to the following, Darwin Falls showed a willingness to incorporate longer form songwriting and a more mellow atmospheric side quite similar to something like SubRosa, and that's an evolution that goes hand in hand with them following that up with a collab with a drone doom band.

So how does Vestigial Spectra actually fare? Well instead of being an even mix of both bands' styles, it shifts focus quite a bit between heavier cuts in which it feels like Fawn Limbs deliver heaviness and Nadja's drones work to add some extra heavy texture over the top, creating something even denser than Fawn Limbs have created so far, while the mellower cuts run even deeper in the direction that they were going on Darwin Falls, with Fawn Limbs making Nadja's atmospheric drones even noisier to create some of the most abrasive ambient music out there. The two bands try to find common ground not just in the points where they could meet halfway, but they force each others' sounds unto a larger spectrum that would cover most of what they'd been up to before, and as much as that experiments leaves some moments where the two bands don't gel as well and when the flow feels disjointed, it also creates a more fascinating overview of what the two bands are capable of when they push their limits.