At the end of the twentieth century, Neurosis were one of the most original bands in the genre straddling industrial music, heavy metal, and gothic. Their albums were not just terrifying heaps of crude sounds: they were also layers and layers of experiments in building chilling atmospheres and detonating them in the most abominable ways.

Neurosis formed in Oakland, California, in 1985 by Scott Kelly (vocals and guitar), Dave Edwardson (bass), and Jason Roeder (drums). Their first album, Pain Of Mind (Alchemy, 1987 – Alternative Tentacles, 1994)

The band found its classic lineup and a more personal style with the addition of Steve Von Till, soon also co-author with Kelly of their material. Pain Of Mind anticipated its time by a few years with proto-“grunge” sounds. Despite the typical emphatic fury of hardcore, Life On Your Knees exhibits truculence reminiscent of Black Sabbath. Grey borrows elements from death metal, Helios Creed, and all demonic rock. Alongside it comes a component, no less violent, of sarcasm, giving rise to insult-speeches like United Sheep. Even the most traditionally hardcore tracks, like Pain Of Mind, display a level of despair that is psychologically deeper than average. It is truly a “pain of the mind,” something that penetrates deeply into individual (and perhaps social) consciousness, originating not only from the authoritarian abuses of parents and police but from the very structure of society itself.

The track Common Inconsistencies, released on a compilation and full of speed-metal fervor, the subsequent EP, Aberration (Alchemy) of January 1989, with the instrumental Pollution, and the album Word As Law (Sympathy, 1990) all present a complex, almost art-rock sound, with frequent excursions beyond hardcore.
The agonizing vocals, rhythmic irregularities, thrash chases, and intellectualized lyrics of Double-Edged Sword, the dark and tragic sound verging on paranoia of Choice, together compose a terrifying socio-political fresco. Amid this outpouring of negative sounds swim the martial riffs of Obsequious Obsolescence and the lugubrious slow-motion of Tomorrow's Reality, probably the most striking episodes.
The longer tracks, To What End and Blisters, experiment with even more extended and convoluted forms, with vocals stretched toward infernal abysses, guitars tangled in webs of free counterpoints, the rhythm section torn by syncopations and sudden accelerations, and surprise instrumental interludes. As acrobatic as they are obsessive, the sound of these mini-suites belongs to no genre: in the way it follows and accompanies the “narrative,” it is more reminiscent of the way film soundtracks are “staged.”

The logical next step was the addition of a keyboardist, Simon McIlroy, an up-and-coming avant-garde composer. In this way, tapes and sampling gained the same status as guitar riffs and thrash cadences.

The resulting album, Souls At Zero (Sympathy, 1992), marks another metamorphosis in the band’s sound: the neurosis transforms Flipper-style hardcore into the industrial bacchanalia of Ministry, with a touch more anarchy. The dark, heavy sounds of The Word As Law, with its instrumental excursions reminiscent of Metallica and its demonic tirades, give way to more agile, dynamic, and composite structures (the arrangements feature bells, cello, flute, trumpet, violin, and viola) and more elaborate compositions (most tracks exceed seven minutes).
Souls is a less visceral and more contemplative album, developing ideas expressed by the band in the longer tracks of the previous work. The result is nevertheless, if possible, even more traumatic: the obsessive clamor and chaos of songs like To Crawl Under One's Skin and A Chronology For Survival, up to the massive walls of noise in Takeahnase, emit radiations of total despair, immeasurable agony, extinction of the mind, and the end of civilization.
Each song becomes a kind of variation on a theme, a jam simultaneously improvised and rigorously structured. Peaks of macabre effects are reached in the murderous bursts of The Web and the android symphonism of Stripped, seared by brutal Chrome-style alienation and psychotic Black Sabbath-style cadences. Perhaps less effective are the atmospheric, progressive-rock passages fueling the title track (King Crimson and Genesis with a lethal dose of Voivod). Heavy and monolithic, the sound of this album leverages ten years of hardcore and heavy metal evolution.

Neurosis also curated the visual element of their shows, decorating the live music with videos and slide shows.

Souls' heavy, gothic and futuristic style became a classic with Enemy Of The Sun (Alternative Tentacles, 1993). The tracks have no melodic center to speak of. They constantly teeter over the abyss, in a vain quest for an emotional center of mass. Sounds obey no geometry, they are outpours of desperation.
Lost is an agonizing piece, that lays down Black Sabbath's agonizing, emphatic delivery and slow, rumbling rhythms over a wind of "found" voices. Mind-expanding guitar feedbacks eventually soar in a Blue Cheer-ian maelstrom. A renaissance hymn is brutally raped and smashed in the epileptic fits of rock and roll that shake Raze The Stray, a track that hosts some of the visceral riffs in Neurosis' career.
The title-track is emblematic of the psychological subtlety of this music, no matter how degraded and devoluted it appears to be: after a lengthy introduction of eerie dissonances, whispers and echoes, that sound like the nightmare of a deranged mind, Black Sabbath-ian riffs lead to a "drama" in which human screams and instrumental distortions play a sort of "call and response" soon matched by savage, frantic drumming that functions as a third voice. The interplay among these three elements multiplies the emotional impact.
The majestic, hyper-glooomy The Time Of The Beasts stands as both the anthem and the requiem for these "enemies of the sun".
The intensity is so harrowing that the shorter tracks are not songs: they are veritable infernos, their instruments the musical equivalent of burning embers. As the singer screams exoteric formulas, Lexicon is devastated by apocalyptic drumming, chaotic guitar riffs, machine-gun bass lines, and abominable noises. The tribal, bass-heavy Cold Ascending builds an ideal bridge between Neurosis' post-industrial music, the sub-gothic moods of Swans and the criminal accelerations of Black Flag. Despite the chaos, the instrumental scores are highly sophisticated.

Tribes Of Neurot is a side-project by the Neurosis members, who use this moniker to release more experimental (non-rock) music. Tribes Of Neurot debuted with the double 7" Rebegin (Alleysweeper) and first proved to be more than a distraction with Silver Blood Transmission (Release, 1995), an epic-length instrumental album containing live improvisations of an unnerving kind. Primordial Uncarved Block is a concerto for electronic subsonic noises and distant rumbles (attempting to capture the music that exists all over the universe, shapeless, unheard, before a human mind molds it into songs). Another track, The Accidental Process, seems to describe the (painful and contorted) way in which that sonic sludge turns into melody and rhythm and harmony.
In common with Neurosis, Tribes Of Neurot has the passion for extreme sounds, and that seems to be the main thematic key of the work. The eerie silence of Fall Back To Stone is broken by bells and Bach-ian keyboards. Continuous Regression is a swirling gust of sharp distortions. Monstruous vibrations populate Wolf Lava, that could be the soundtrack for a natural catastrophe.
Fires Of Purification returns to a more typical format, a tribal orgy a` la Crash Worship, enhanced with power-drills, jackhammers and assorted noises.
Achtwan is a gigantic, and unabashedly ambitious, avantgarde piece, 24 minutes of discrete noise and long pauses, deliberately discordant and unpleasant, the ultimate "metal machine music" (to paraphrase Lou Reed).
Tribes Of Neurot is classical music for punks.
The album was followed by the mini-CD Locust Star (Release) and the 10" God Of The Center (Conspiracy). Later, the early Neurot recordings will be collected on 60 (Neurot, 2001).

Continuing Neurosis' evolution, Through Silver In Blood (Relapse, 1996) outperforms Enemy Of The Sun in terms of musical construction and sheer emotional power. The 12-minute title-track is a concentrate of everything that makes Neurosis such an extreme experience: tribal drums, terrifying riffs, death-metal vocals. The music teeters on the edge of the psychic abyss, like King Crimson's 21st Century Schizoid Man played by 21st century schizoid men, and then relents into an agonizing declamation set in a desolate soundscape. Another 12-minute nightmare, Purify, exhales a loudly stoned, Hendrix-ian blues before erupting with evil riffs and manic screams; until the sound fades in a surreal sonata for clangs, bagpipes and tribal beat. The same mood is reflected in the shorter tracks, whose intensity is simply suicidal. Eye and especially Locust Star are mini-opuses of utter dejection, disassembled songs that seem to be falling from the moon.
Aeon has a different feel, because the spasmodic tension is released in Pink Floyd-ian calm and then in utter cosmic panic. Enclosure In Flame is the lengthy ceremony that closes the album, the musical equivalent of piercing an eye with a blazing blade. Each of these complex scores materializes slowly, following a few minutes of instrumental introduction a` la Tribes Of Neurot. Music has never been so black.

Static Migration (Release, 1998) is an exceptional collaboration between Neurosis (in the more experimental, multimedia guise of Tribes Of Neurot) and Scott Ayers, the Texas-based experimentalist (formerly Pain Teens) who now goes by the name Walking Time Bombs. The music on the record is entirely instrumental, performed by an eleven-person ensemble and mostly electronic. Guitars are used like synthesizers, only to emit long, sharp drones. Probably the protagonists are Steve Von Till and Ayers, the “painters” of this extremely violent and degraded scenario.

The record opens under the banner of Steve Roach's electronic poems: Unspoken Path begins with a patchwork of eerie nocturnal sounds, but then the loops of dissonance take over with their stupefying trance effect. Rust releases a languid distorted guitar solo over a complex African polyrhythmic drum pattern. Recurring Birth opens with a vortex of percussive and found noises, all ingeniously manipulated in the studio and mixed with bass chords. In Origin Unknown the guitars intone oriental dance steps that never complete - they just keep recycling unchanging and anemic, and in the end the feeling that remains is the angelic one of a Renaissance madrigal. The barbs and screeches of Blood And Water range from free-jazz, from Sun Ra and from the Rova Saxophone Quartet, to Gordon Mumma's explosive pieces. March To The Sun (sixteen minutes) is reminiscent of Helios Creed's more off-the-wall pieces, with the guitar swirling in spacey solos, a slaughtering rhythm, and sudden pauses of electronic disturbances. Overall this is a masterful work of electronic avant-garde.
The disc closes with the thirteen, dreamlike minutes of Edgewood, a mini-concerto of guitar chords left to float freely and then mercilessly looped against a distressing backdrop of indecipherable noise.

With As The Crow Flies (Neurot, 2000) Steve Von Till, Neurosis' main composer, has written his first truly shocking album, not because it expands on the band's apocalyptic industrial-metal, but precisely because it does the opposite: Von Till finds shelter in acoustic chamber pieces for piano, guitar and strings. Like the later Swans, Von Till has trascended his inner ghosts and achieved a personal nirvana, no less disquieting than the stormy "neurosis" that preceded it.

A transition for Neurosis began with their album Times of Grace (Relapse, 1999). Despite the apocalyptic emphasis of End of the Harvest and the lugubrious, 10-minute hymn of Away, tracks like Prayer and Belief were actually regular songs. The band was also maturing as a whole, as drummer Jason Roeder and keyboardist Noah Landis contributed to the overall sound as much as leaders Scott Kelly and Steven Von Till. However, the formidable impact of the previous albums seemed to be lost forever.

Tribes Of Neurot's Grace (Neurot, 1999) is the companion album, one that focuses on textures and atmospherics rather than on brains and emotions, not a remix but a complement.

Sixty Degrees (Neurot, 2001) compiles Tribes of Neurot singles and rarities.

Neurosis' Sovereign (Neurot, 2001) is an EP that collects four lengthy tracks that were excluded from Times Of Grace (and comes with a multimedia presentation).

A simpler, thinner and less noisy production (with increased reliance on acoustic guitars and even violin and viola) lends A Sun That Never Sets (Relapse, 2001) a mellow, gloomy feeling akin to late Swans and Nick Cave. The symphonic poem The Title (nine minutes) is the perfect introduction to the mature style of Neurosis: an acoustic theme opens the tale in the fashion of apocalyptic folk, borrowing Nick Cave's prophetic tone; then a majestic viola-driven waltz takes over, almost a concession to neo-classical ambitions; and finally the song erupts in a Black Sabbath-ian panzer-riff, that makes Type O Negative's suites sound gentle. Von Till does not waste time in From The Hill (nine minutes) to vent his angst in his best death-metal register over funereal beats, with an accompaniment that at one point even sounds like pipes and that keep rising in emphasis. A Sun That Never Sets is a sort of appendix, music for burying souls that are still alive, an ultra-gothic march through dark catacombs. The gripping intensity of these pieces is, unfortunately, diluted by the lengthy (13 minutes) Falling Unknown, that features a cosmic electronic intermezzo and some tedious repetition of past stereotypes.
The demonic pow-wow dance of From Where Its Roots Run reopens the gates of hell, that are finally burned by Watchfire, a symphonic threnody of devastating power. The epic ten-minute raga of Stones From the Sky, that ends the album with a tribal orgy of biblical proportions and with the guitar's tremolo evoking another dimension, highlights the band's cohesive playing.
Despite a pervasive, Pink Floyd-ian repetition of the melodic theme over and over again, until it drills holes in the subconscious, this album represents the "classical" stage of Neurosis. After all, Neurosis "is" becoming the Pink Floyd of the damned.

Tribes of Neurot's Adaptation and Survival - The Insect Project (Neurot, 2002) is a two-disc project, whose "music" is the electronic/digital manipulation (or, better, remixes) of field recordings of insects. The two discs are supposed to be played simultaneously on different CD players for maximum appreciation. Most of it is pure childish indulgence, but at least Metamorphosis reaches an intimidating intensity.

Von Till continued the passion begun with As The Crow Flies on another desolate collection, If I Should Fall To The Field (Neurot, 2002). This time around, the selection is less harrowing, but the delivery is still glacial and macabre, very similar to Michael Gira's.

Neurosis' guitarist Scott Kelly debuted solo with the acoustic sub-folk music of Spirit Bound Flesh (Neurot, 2001). Scott Kelly also started the project Blood & Time with Neurosis' keyboardist Noah Landis: the sound of At The Foot Of the Garden (Neurot, 2004) is post-rock grafted on folk-rock, diluting Neurosis' apocalypse in a more humane melancholy.

The collaboration between Neurosis & Jarboe (Neurot, 2003) is largely a wasted chance. The two entities (Neurosis in the Tribes of Neurot mood, and Jarboe the fairy queen from hell) could do better than indulge in sinister overtones a` la Siouxsie Sioux.

The Eye Of Every Storm (Neurot, 2004) is another slab of melodramatic industrial folk.
Attention to the lyrical aspect of the music has changed Neurosis quite a bit. The slow and mournful and morbid elegy Burn sounds like Tom Waits accidentally fronting Blue Cheer. The 12-minute The Eye Of Every Storm tastes like vomit but ultimately it is a power ballad with a bit of psychedelic doodling and an eerie intermezzo. Ditto for A Season In The Sky, despite the emphatic riffs and thundering drums. Both are penalized by mediocre and uninspired singing.
Occasionally the song construction is mildly original. The electronic maelstrom that gives birth to Left To Wander is merely a replacement for the traditional guitar riff, that erupts a bit later to sustain a hypnotic slow-motion stoner dance. The emotional peak (and the only moment that vaguely recalls the original Neurosis) comes with the agonizing Bridges, that is basically a collection of stereotypes of angst (from silence to hyper-distorted guitar).
There is, however, an inherent inconsistency in these lengthy psychodramas. Scott Kelly is not exactly the most melodious of vocalists and Jason Roeder can be as monotonous a drummer as the hands of a clock. Therefore the responsibility for animating a song falls squarely on guitar (Steve Von Till) and keyboards (Noah Landis and Dave Edwardson). And they are rarely up to the task. The instrumental parts are tentative at best.
The album failed because, ultimately, the pomp and angst was not justified by the music, that too often indulged in martial paces and macabre tones, trivial in the way it alternated violent passages and fragile passages.

All in all, Neurosis' trilogy of the turn of the century (Times of Grace, Sun That Never Sets, The Eye Of Every Storm) marked a retreat from the fiery hell of their first five albums. Like a consummate storyteller, Neurosis now conceived the "song" as an unlimited number of both mood changes (from calm to neurotic to frantic to hysterical) and "voices" (timbres, rhythms, textures, polyphony, dissonance). Not only anything "can" happen during a song, but everything "must" happen, in order to maximize the devastating effect on an audience that becomes more and more dependent on sheer instability, addicted on being taken constantly on and beyond the edge. The idea had its merit, but, a decade after the Swans, it hardly sounded as revolutionary as Neurosis' early albums, that the new generation struggled to match in intensity and invention.

Harvestman's Lashing The Rye (2005) was Steve Von Till's venture into psychedelic folk.

Tribes of Neurot returned after a four-year hiatus with Meridian (Neurot, 2006), the least accomplished album of the series, ten pieces that test different aspects of sound manipulation art but fail to achieve any memorable result.

Neurosis' Given To The Rising (Neurot, 2007) boasts a heavier, magniloquent sound (actually reminiscent of their beginnings) making The Eye Of Every Storm sound like some kind of new-age middle-life crisis. The carefully orchestrated melodrama of "songs" such as the nine-minute Given To The Rising (that opens emphatically like vintage Black Sabbath but delivers its message in a somber and mostly wordless passage, and ends with a guitar jam that epitomizes their best balance of the bombastic and the subtle), Water Is Not Enough (another careening Black Sabbath sound-alike that instead plunges into ghostly cacophony), the nine-minute Distill (a gothic waltz whose intermezzo is just a long drone), the 12-minute Origin (a subdued rant in a soundscape of drones and psychedelic strumming that after nine minutes comes to life), hinted at more metaphysical horizons than their psychedelic/ esoteric postulates. The unstable dynamics of Neurosis' songs got more sophisticated too, with To The Wind mutating from a guitar carillon into a ferocious grunge'n'roll into a procession of catatonic riffs, and with The End of the Road spending the first five minutes in another (barely audible) dimension before exploding on this planet in all its ugliness (followed by the three-minute electronic intermezzo Shadow that reconnects with that supernatural dimension). Neurosis' spectral textural symphonies kept acquiring new meaning as the band's members progressed in their lives.

Scott Kelly's The Wake (2008) continued the introverted epic of Spirit Bound Flesh. Scott Kelly and Noah Landis continued the saga of Blood & Time with At The Foot Of The Garden (Neurot, 2004) and Untitled (Latitudes 0:12) (Southern, 2007), two works of introverted gloomy folk-rock a` la latter-day Swans.

Steve Von Till's slow, spectral, anemic A Grave is a Grim Horse (2008) included four covers.

Shrinebuilder (Neurot, 2009) was a supergroup consisting of Scott Kelly (Neurosis), Al Cisneros (Om, Sleep), Dale Crover (the Melvins), and Wino (Obsessed, Spirit Caravan, Saint Vitus) playing very old-fashioned doom-metal a` la Black Sabbath.

Steve Von Till resumed his moniker Harvestman for a completely different album, the mostly instrumental In A Dark Tongue (Burning World, 2009), both much more psychedelic (or at least spaced-out and free-form) and much more rocking. Some of the pieces have no drums and roam the inner landscape: World Ash is a distorted guitar sonata a' la Neil Young's Dead Man; a massive distortion wipes out an electronic pulsation and a sort of death knell in Karlsteine; and In A Dark Tongue, the most spaced-out piece, drowns in a volley of languid glissandoes. Von Till is equally, if not more, interesting when employing the full arsenal of rock music: the 13-minute By Wind And Sun (a song with lyrics, although they are simply looped around in a deteriorating form) is a loud, pounding, stoner-rock jam with wild synth counterpoint; and The Hawk Of Achill is a chaotic duet of cosmic guitar and synth melodies at a "motorik" locomotive-like rhythm (with Al Cisneros on bass). Changing style again, Harvestman's third album Trinity (Neurot, 2010) was the (far less interesting) soundtrack to a horror movie.

Steve Albini produced all their albums since 1999 and produced again Honor Found In Decay (Neurot, 2012), possibly their most melodic and subdued work yet. We All Rage in Gold begins ebullient and peaks with an aria that sounds like the anthem of a romantic vampyre in a Broadway musical. The ten-minute At the Well agonizing power-ballad (with actually a catchy refrain and decorative guitar work) stretched to the limit via atmospheric pauses. The pace is often slow, and the start excruciatingly slow, and whether this is because of an artful psychological strategy or because the band doesn't know what to do with the melody is anybody's guess; but the effect is rarely mesmerizing like in the furious old days. The macabre languor of Raise the Dawn is hardly a match for the visceral turmoils of the past. Keyboardist and soundscape designer Noah Landis animates the slow portions, but often sounds like a separate force, not integrated at all in the overall sound. For example, the first minute of My Heart for Deliverance is his creature, but hardly prepares or connects with the thundering (and tedious) Black Sabbath-ian recitation that ensues, and ditto for the mid-section of almost silence before the melodramatic Pink Floyd-ian ending.