Airs – Gloomlights

October 31, 2011 • Music Ruins Lives

Oh no, not the dreaded double album. If I haven't made it clear before, I almost always despise rock double albums; they are almost always half-full of horrible garbage that shouldn't have been recorded in the first place. I won't say there's much I'd call garbage on Gloomlights, but it's clear that there

The band tends to genre-jump a lot on this album, and it's tough say if that's necessarily a good thing. Many of the shorter tracks lie somewhere in the shoegaze / post-punk realm, sort of like the very fuzzed-out guitars of My Bloody Valentine combined with the gloomy melodies and atmospheres of The Cure. (Admittedly I've never listened to much shoegaze in the first place, so I don't have much to compare Airs to.) The band also experiments a bit with music ranging from post-rock to stoner rock to black metal to pop-rock to drone, all with the same sort of lo-fi aesthetic.

I have to give Airs credit for managing to write so many songs in such different styles and none of them are particularly bad (except the repetitive and dull opener "Harvest Moon"), but none of them really stick out either, and the band definitely can't keep up the pace for the entire hour and forty minutes the album lasts. By the time the second disc starts up, I'm ready to call it a day. I guess that probably says more about my attention span, but still, they don't give much of a reason to stick around.

Also, this is probably just me, but I find the synthesized drums and bass guitar really distracting. Excessive reverb doesn't hide the fact that they're both quite amateur-sounding.

So I guess your enjoyment of this album hinges on how into this style you are. I'm ambivalent, so Gloomlights is listenable but definitely nothing special. Maybe others will be amazed by it, and I can understand, but not me.

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