ith the release of Esmerine’s impressive 2003 debut, If Only a Sweet Surrender to the Nights to Come Be True, multi-instrumentalists Beckie Foon and Bruce Cawdron added another strand of horsehair to the Godspeed collective’s already bulging bow. Since the exclamation mark migrated westwards on the back of the bleak and wordless Yanqui U.X.O, the focus has shifted onto the side-projects and associated acts of the apocalyptic Canadian coterie: namely Efrim’s increasingly vocal-driven Silver Mt. Zion reincarnations, the percussion-loaded avant-gardism of Roger’s Fly Pan Am, and the frightening, chaotic ambience of the thirteen-strong Set Fire to Flames. Esmerine’s starkly beautiful follow-up, Aurora, deserves to be given as much attention as her equally tormented older brothers. Over the course of forty minutes and six movements Foon and Cawdron et al provide a dirgeful opus of clevises, cowbells, and weeping, sawing strings; a cycle of loss—a soundtrack to the world’s end.

Aurora opens with “Quelques Mots Pleins D'ombre,” an exquisite piece driven by interlaced cellos that build ever so slowly amidst bass guitar and delicately fingered piano, eventually reaching a crescendo in front of urgent drumming and thrashed cymbals. The track serves as a forlorn prelude to its epic succeeder, “Histories Repeating as 1000 Hearts Mend,” a near on seventeen-minute threnody that follows in the mould of its predecessor; a relentlessly sombre march between colonnades of marimba, hubcaps, and sleigh bells. The comparatively short “Mados” leads the listener into a loggia featuring Aurora’s more experimental second half, commencing with the delicate, pianistic grandeur of “Why She Swallows Bullets and Stones.” The traditional instrumentation that initiates the piece gradually becomes entangled with conflicting, grinding noise before it frees itself and fades into the foreboding atmospherics of “Ebb Tide, Spring Tide, Neap Tide, Flood” wherein a series of windblown bells and chimes hang and clangour ominously from decaying, static-infested eaves as the hissing, climactic release of “Le Rire de L'ange” prepares to conclude the album.

Esmerine’s Aurora is the sound of nations grinding to a halt as the dust settles from the final explosion of the final piece of nuclear ordnance. It is the sound of the meek waiting timidly in stripped shells of burning cars for the intrusions of cockroaches to abate. It is the sound of a loved one passing away, the sound of a marriage disintegrating; it is the sound of unrequited love. It is the sound of losing one’s sight; the sound of morphine overdoses and pethidine dreams. Yet, despite the sadness, there is an underlying beauty at work so immense that one cannot help but be drawn in and enveloped.