For a lot of serious listeners, expectations develop for favored artists’ upcoming releases. Many of these expectations are based upon what we felt was done so well on our most treasured album in a given artist’s repertoire. In some instances, expectations are exceeded, and a new plane of musical existence is opened for us to hear. My favorite memory of an album performing this function was when I first really grasped the power and brightness of aura Amon Tobin created with Supermodified. It is still an album that I return to for a familiar, yet boundless listening experience. On the other hand, sometimes an album falls painfully short of our expectations.

Jacaszek’s new album Pentral inhabits the liminal space between these two polar perceptions of an artist’s new interpretation of the world—that is, expectation and disappointment. It is not the disappointment that Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine was for some, but it also refuses obstinately to surpass the power of its predecessor Treny. Pentral (Latin for inside, spirit, temple) is ultimately frustrating in its lack of solid identity (a quality that Jacaszek's previous album possessed); so frustrating, in fact, that it is occasionally rendered unlistenable.

The first two pieces start out as a fine “attempt to describe a gothic church interior by means of sounds,” as the artist himself describes his intentions. Quickly, though, their streaming, soul-calming ambience is shattered by monolithic stabs of pipe organ. Normally, this is not a bad thing, but when you need to rip the headphones off your ears to protect them, because the variance in levels is so drastic that it brings you pain (and almost explodes your eardrums), it is nearly unforgivable. Playing with dynamics in sound and volume variance are part of musical experimentation, but this comes off as a form of torture more akin to the CIA than the Spanish Inquisition. Further damage is done by these pipe organ shadow monoliths when you realize that they completely drown out the subtleties and nuances of all the other sounds (found, accidental, plucked, pinged, knocked, ad nauseum).

“III” returns me to the cradle of dark comfort that I’ve come to rely on artists like Murcof and Jacaszek to provide. The "Dracula’s Bride" female vocals reappear, inhabiting the dusty, wooden floorboards underneath the curtains of an antechamber in Jacaszek’s Gdansk churches. When restrained, by his own will, in the calmer moments of this record, I believe he truly does describe a gothic church by its sound signature. The way the reverb carries sounds across the arched, high ceilings mimics the possibility that a mud-faced peasant’s prayers could still be ringing endlessly through the hall, hundreds of years later. The church has its own musical spirit, but it will turn its back on the audience when the pipe organ is thrust into the spotlight at such violating levels and without crescendo or decrescendo.

Images of stained-glass refracted light dancing in the holy water come to mind when “V” starts into its cycle. This passage’s ruminative effect is aided by a carefully-crafted layercake of samples and loops, all of which rely on the calm after-tones of sound still chasing ghosts. But again, in “VI”, the obtrusive pipe organ (and now choir, if you can stand to listen through it) lay waste to what is an otherwise simply dark meditation.

The conflict for me in listening to Pentral has been my desire not to listen to it, based purely on these horrifying stabs of organ and, sometimes, choir. Tragically, it is not the instruments, or even the tones of the sounds that are the offender(s), but in the way they are used. If only Jacaszek had spent a little more time sifting through the echoes and reverb manipulations of those sounds, he could have incorporated them into the whole of the soundscape in a much more aesthetically pleasing manner.

So, obviously, I have to hypothesize that this is all done with his stated purpose of capturing the church in mind, but I don’t see where the jarring contrast of the organ meets that goal. Is it to illustrate the sanctity and the horror of the church? Should I transport myself to the churches of Dresden and the fire-engulfed night of Vonnegut’s early adulthood?

This is certainly worth a good few listens, but be warned to lay off the headphones and don’t expect to hold on to Pentral the way many did Treny.

-Gabriel Bogart