Neurosis - The Eye of Every Storm

"Every song on 'The Eye of Every Storm is so beautiful and engaging that it’s hard to know where to start discussing them. Album opener “Burn” is the most brisk of the tracks here, but still sparse and melodic enough to mirror the pastoral images of sunlight and warm air contained in the lyrics. The key to the album might be found halfway through “Burn”: when the guitars briefly crash in, they draw more attention to the synth-and-voice tenderness that follows than they do to themselves. It’s clear by the song’s sweet, textured din of an ending that The Eye of Every Storm is going to be an album of warmth, a humid, claustrophobic warmth that first alarms, then sedates and, finally, suffocates.

This atmosphere permeates every track, infusing each song with both beauty and unease. “No River To Take Me Home” is, even at its loudest moments, completely hypnotic. You may even think the repetitive space rock fade-out is a dream until you find yourself drifting amid the ten-minute-plus title track, which is built solely on sustained bass and synth notes until the guitars make an entrance at the nine-minute mark.

From that point on, guitars return to prominence, but wrapped in gauze-y fuzz and accompanied by thick down-tuned bass, they remain invariably narcotic. Classic slow-motion eruptions can still be found in “Bridges”, where the heaviness of the drumless sludge passages is almost unbearable, and in the ten-minute “A Season In the Sky”, but this is a meditative album, a headphones album, one of the finest releases of Neurosis’s career and one of the best records of 2004."'
- Stylus Magazine