Astral Auguries: Fall of Efrafa

Dredging up the musical past for future enjoyment.

Well, folks, this latest entry of Astral Auguries was a fun one. While working on an earlier version of this piece, I managed to accidentally fall down a deep, dark Bandcamp rabbit-hole before landing on a trio of entirely different records that left a lasting impression on my already overloaded psyche.

After several twists, turns, and hastily opened tabs, we’re finally here to talk about Brighton emo-crust/sludge purveyors Fall of Efrafa.

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Anyone who knows me well enough is already aware that I pretty much run my life through spreadsheets. I have one for this newsletter, another for ongoing freelance work, another for journal submissions and errant academic work, etc. And that’s not to mention my casual day-job bullshit and the mountain of Sharepoint material I wade through there on a daily basis… But I digress.

During my working week, I’m often curating daily playlists for myself, queuing up records, checking out singles, watching videos, and generally keeping abreast of the inundation of new releases. If I find something of interest, but I’m too busy to write about it then and there, I’ll drop a note in one of these various spreadsheets, typically in ALL CAPS with a dumb reference devoid of any appropriate context, and then, well, that’s Future Owen’s problem. (Yeah, cheers mate. — Sincerely, Future Owen)

This particular rabbit-hole starts with the following note: “ANOPHELI A HUNGER NEVER SATED.” Cool… great start. After running a search for this random band/album, I came across Oakland outfit Anopheli and a remastered version of their 2014 debut release, A Hunger Rarely Sated.

Musically, there’s a lot going on here. There’s a chaotic blend of sludge, crust and d-beat that frequently gives way to sparse ambience and angular melodies. It’s all bleak and morbid and vastly entertaining. Oh, did I mention there’s also cello? Yeah, there’s cello in here. It’s wild.

Looking around at comments and reviews for the record, I began to think of angles for this piece and how I’d cover a record that while hardly brand new, isn’t really that old either. It wasn’t until a cursory glance at the band’s members and other associated projects kept returning a mysterious name that I felt the urge to dive deeper.

For some reason that I couldn’t quite place, this name already felt familiar. So, I did some preliminary searches, looked at some results but nothing really stuck out. However, on a whim, I chucked the name into Twitter and thought “Fuck it. Let’s see what comes up.” And just like that, with the power of clicks, I had immediately located the nascent thread lurking in the back of my skull.

It turns out that people were throwing around the name Fall of Efrafa in association with Collisions, the stellar debut record from UK post-metal outfit THÅRN, which I featured in my most recent Weekly Roundup:

Everything about this record is pitch-perfect post-metal: dense atmospherics, crushing heaviness, penetrating vocals, and flawless instrumental transitions. Harrowing and heavenly, Collisions is powerful enough to get your attention and patient enough to make every hit count.

And if you thought the rabbit-hole couldn’t possibly get any deeper, dear reader, strap in—I’m about to go full ‘Charley explaining Pepe Silvia’ here.

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According to their Wiki, Fall of Efrafa formed in Brighton in 2005 before disbanding four years later in 2009. However, during that time, the English quintet managed to be more prolific than most bands are in their entire career, churning out a high-concept album trilogy—2006’s Owsla, 2007’s Elil (2007), and 2009’s Inlé; collected as the 2010 compilation, The Warren of Snares—inspired by the mythology of the 1972 Richard Adams novel, Watership Down.

Not familiar with the novel? No problem! Set in southern England, Watership Down is essentially a fantasy riff on the Homeric epic, centred on a small group of rabbits who live in their natural burrows while also being anthropomorphised for the sake of a compelling narrative. Adams fleshes out his characters with unique language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology, constructing a believable rabbit culture that parallels their very-human plight in the face of environmental destruction, temptation and betrayal. There’s also a 1978 animated film adaptation of the novel that I vaguely remember watching as a child, and ah, it is some truly harrowing shit:

Now, as you would expect, this is all very rich and vivid material for a young crust/sludge outfit to pull from in the mid-2000s. For Fall of Efrafa, the band draws their name from a rabbit warren in the novel controlled by a cruel dictator, along with numerous album and song title references. (Also, side note: “tharn” is a word drawn from the Lapine or rabbit’s language, referring to a state of paralysis or hypnotic fear. Look, I told you, folks—this is a deep one.)

With the “fall” itself, well, that’s essentially the novel’s story told in reverse across each album: Owsla (“police”) chronicles the final push against the dictatorial Efrafa, Elil (“enemy”) is an exploration of those struggling against ideological oppression, and Inlé captures the anxiety of a peaceful society on the brink of collapse and ruin. As Preston Posits notes in a fabulously detailed retrospective on both the band and the novel:

The story told in the Warren of the Snares trilogy is a deeply dark and cynical allegory that examines the tyranny of organized religion, the rise and fall of empires, and humanity’s seeming inability and/or unwillingness to learn from its mistakes.

And it’s this philosophical depth that makes Fall of Efrafa and the Warren of Snares so compelling. Somehow the band manage to synthesise a reading of Adams’ text with radical, left-wing stances on everything from atheism to nationalism and military intervention, while also packaging said analysis into a veritable cornucopia of heavy music styles and soundscapes. It’s ambitious in concept, scope and execution, and I’m utterly enamoured with it.

On that note, let’s talk music. I won’t do full album reviews for the sake of brevity, but there are some choice cuts buried in the 180-plus minutes of music on offer here that I do think are well worth your time and attention.

There’s a restless, almost bursting quality to “A soul to bear” that practically jumps out at you during Owsla’s full-throttle 50-minute run-time. This is easily the most up-tempo portion of Fall of Efrafa’s output, and this track in particular benefits from notions of swiftness.

A folky cello melody pokes through the rubble and ruin of the track’s intro, before caving into a soul-crushing d-beat onslaught. There’s just enough time for a brief sonic reprieve before the band drop right back into a churning dirge against the fallacy of ontological supremacy. In a telling lyrical barb, vocalist and graphic artist Alex CF bellows, “Revel in our glory, in every brother is quarry/Butcher every life, until our land is stained and dead,” effectively linking the hubris of consciousness to exploitation and environmental devastation.

On Elil, the stylistic pivot is stark and obvious. Gone is the cello, along with the focus on relentless d-beat hammering and four-minute song compositions. Instead, the entire record is upheld by three, towering, twenty-minute leviathans, all lumbering under the weight of expansive post-metal and gentle, thoughtful instrumentation.

The album’s centrepiece, “Dominion theology” is the clear stand-out here and might just be my favourite track from Fall of Efrafa. It feels eerily similar to what Cult of Luna and Isis were putting out around this time, while also reaching for a sense of epic, thematic grandeur that Aussie mainstays We Lost The Sea would later capture and perfect on 2012’s The Quietest Place on Earth. The track swells and crests around five individual movements, as Alex CF rails against the corruption of faith and resistance to the heretical nature of sociological advancement: “Our vainglorious divinity/ Fertile manure of the oppressed/ Seething in cruor of the devout/ Lives shed in adoration of you.”

When it all drops away and kicks back in again around the ten-minute mark, it’s heavy and melancholic and lush and almost too much to bear.

The final instalment in the trilogy, Inlé, is a fitting culmination to everything that came before, only this time it’s rawer, more intense and stylistically varied—think a bulkier, more sullen Circle Takes The Square.

“The burial” clocks in at close to twelve minutes and makes the most of every single second. Alex CF’s vocals are plaintive, strained and guttural, Mikey Douglas’ bass rumbles malevolently like a demonic cement mixer, and guitarists Steven McCusker, Neil Kingsbury and producer Peter Miles construct a cavernous labyrinth of fuzz and distortion with every quaking riff and multi-tracked layer. At numerous points, the track feels like it might spontaneously combust and come apart right there in your eardrums.

The beauty is that it never does.

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As Gary Budden outlines in The Warren is Empty: Watership Down and Fall of Efrafa:

[These] three records present a fleshed-out political and social ideology, with numerous references to animal rights, a strong sense of militant atheism (one song, “Republic of Heaven” has the line “Your God is dead’ bellowed out a fair few times) and a full-on attack against mankind’s destructiveness and analysis of our relationship with religion and the fight against tyrannical forms of power. It’s cheery stuff perfect for parties.

You may think the music most fitting a story of English rabbits fleeing their warren across a countryside under threat would be Fairport Convention-style folk-rock, or worse, earnest acoustic strumming. Not so with Fall of Efrafa, [whose] sound is an explosive mixture of doom, post-rock and D-beat hardcore punk.

I’m eternally thankful for persevering with this particular rabbit-hole, because, without it, I wouldn’t have found a band as dense and strangely alluring as Fall of Efrafa.

In the end, I might be late to the party—over a decade since they disbanded—but it’s never too late to enjoy the leftovers.

Stream the Warren of Snares trilogy here: Bandcamp | Spotify