July 4, 2012 • self-released
Never leave it to a band to categorize themselves. I found Sun Devoured Earth through Bandcamp listed in the black metal section, but Sounds of Desolation is about as far from black metal as you can get; instead it's some sort of shoegaze thing. False advertising aside, it's a fairly decent album, although not really for me and not something I'm going to be coming back to often.
"Shoegaze" is a bit unfair, as Sun Devoured Earth clearly takes influences from all over—post-rock, contemporary folk, ambient and drone, gothic rock, etc. The end result sounds a lot like many "bedroom" post-rock bands I've heard (the combination of machine-like drum and piano lines contributes to that), albeit a bit more polished and professional-sounding. The atmosphere is nice—very floaty and ethereal, drenched in reverb with lots of echoing post-rock-style guitars and piano, topped off with enigmatic vocals buried deep within the mix. In very simple terms, it almost sounds like some sort of The Cure + My Bloody Valentine collaboration.
So it's decent-sounding, but it suffers from a significant flaw: all the songs are incredibly short. It's a weird complaint, but with this kind of music I feel like the tracks don't get any time to develop and move around—it's just one quick idea repeated a few times and then they're on to the next thing. So the album winds up as a very fast-paced listen, which I think ends up sounding a bit bizarre and consequently the album isn't terribly memorable for me.
Even if I'm not very enthusiastic and Sounds of Desolation doesn't come close to the top of the heap in terms of quality or originality, I suppose it does have its moments here and there. I can't see anyone going crazy for it, though, except perhaps a very limited audience.
No comments:
Post a Comment