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[email protected] www.NeurotRecordings.com Neurosis Sovereign Reissue NR077 CD Unsafe. Unsure. And screaming. —Neurosis, "Prayer" For the last 26 years, NEUROSIS have tapped into the elusive wellspring where resonance and dissonance collude, circling emotional poles where nothing is withheld, where the psyche screams for answers to Earth's ancient mysteries. Originally unveiled in 2000, the four-song, 32-minute Sovereign EP was the first NEUROSIS release issued through the band's own Neurot Recordings, with the vinyl appearing via Hydra Head. In chronological terms, Sovereign served as a millennial segue between two of the band's most revered full- lengths, 1999's Times Of Grace and 2001's A Sun That Never Sets. Opener "Prayer" sets the omnipotent tone for all that follows. A master-class in deep dynamics, the song ascends from its quiet beginnings into a rolling, hypnotic power-dirge couched in a bone-rattling rhythm. The potential mental imagery is vast and varied: A parade of dervishes and charlatans slither across the firelight in Plato's Cave. Mankind's sentence is pronounced. The light swallows everything. Everything becomes nothing. "An Offering" brings arsenic visions of Eden—or at least of the ruinous snake and the tree of knowledge around which it infamously coiled. The book of Genesis and the Iron Age collide in a forgotten corner beyond time. A litany of primordial premonitions torment the psyche, unhinged finally in the song's crushing, apocalyptic ending, which easily ranks amongst the band's heaviest, most effective outpourings.