Rating: 7.7

Country: UK

Genre: Ambient/Experimental

Record Label: White Label Music/Alrealon Music

Release Date: 2008

Track list:
1. Who Am I
2. The Price of Redemption
3. The Marks of Sin
4. Eternal Life
5. Whosoever Believeth
6. Shall Not Perish
7. Justice Served

Band Website: John 3:16

John 3:16 - Self Titled

Ph.: guitars, bass, samples, keyboards, noises and textures

Pop this CD in some appropriate playing device. Assume the lotus position in a comfortable setting. Gently close your eyelids and breath rhythmically but naturally, counting one to five while inhaling and doing the same while exhaling. Repeat. This is basically the only way I got this platter of experimental ambient music to 'work' for me. Having it as a background accompaniment while doing the bills won't do much - if anything it will distract you quite irritatingly from the task at hand. No, the optimum means by which your mind will embrace the entire gamut of the music’s psychological effects is to fully immerse into it. And this is natural considering that there aren’t really any catchy hooks or stand-out verses that you can sing along while taking a shower; this is serious, even intimidating business.

Evidently enough, John 3:16 bears a distinctly religious tone. But this needn't necessarily mean that it takes a dogmatic stand against modern secularism but rather an explorative meditation on the pertinent themes of redemption and fideism. The album makes use of different elements and it sounds coalesced enough for it to carry its own particular brand of bona fide out-thereness without borrowing too much from its aesthetical influences. The future of the band also seems promising since the bedrock of the artistic direction undertaken herein is quite fertile for further experimentation. There is a structure of sorts; even a subtle oriental scale is being followed at certain points. Holistic context is of the essence; no crescendo, no compositional fragment, no facet of the music can be appreciated here solely on its own accord.

Although emerging patterns betray their minimalist core the expansive progression of the compositions is far from static. Amidst bowel-churning low frequencies and hypnotically repetitive motifs, there is a discernible élan vital that suffuses the album, unfolding the music continuously in flowing motion. Rhythm becomes transparent; time increasingly non-discrete. There may even be episodic instances where that seemingly innate sense of perisomatic space will partially collapse due to the music's knack for inducing trippy states of mind. I'm hypothesising (rather tentatively) that this is because of the disorientating harmonic dissonance caused by viscous stratums of spaced-out ambient textures superimposed against psychotropic, keyboard-laden dronescapes. At more uncomfortable times the listening endeavor can be like being trapped between the Scylla of forbidding trepidation and the Charybdis of confounding sensory overload. Or maybe it's just me. Who knows/cares. Point is that next to Endura's Black Eden and Sunn-O)))’s White1 this is definitely one album I wouldn’t recommend one to listen to while being on shrooms or some mescaline derivative.

Well ok, maybe once but not more.

August 20th, 2008