AMS album of the week 21

With my short side-parted hair and corduroy jacket, I’m about as far away from metal as you can get. Always open to new experiences, however, Deafheaven’s upcoming sophomore album Sunbather caught my eye. Described as “shoegaze with black metal drumming and vocals,” and with a cover more reminiscant of drinking pink lemonade on a summer’s day than of satanic rituals in Norwegian forests, it looked to be far from the usual black metal fare. It seems that the span from shoegaze through post-rock to metal may not be an impossible one to bridge.

Beginning with an unrelenting torrent of distorted guitars and frantic drums, it lives up to the description: this is undeniably black metal – purists may claim that it’s not “trve” enough – but with a major key, a series of powerful crescdeni and melodic tunes picked out on the lead guitar, it takes the genre in a completely new direction – at least to this outside observer. This may be the most uplifting album I’ve heard all year.

While I’m no stranger to screamed vocals, thosewho are certainly shouldn’t be put off – incoherent and fierce, yet not grating, they blend so well into the mix that they become almost like just another guitar effect. They could just as easily be screams of anger as they could of pure, unadulterated joy.

The album’s fourth and central song, ‘Please Remember’, provides a brief respite after twenty minutes of the near-continual wall of sound with sampled speech over a back-masked strings loop which eventually decays, drowned out by ever-increasing distortion until a soft acoustic guitar rhythm plays out the rest of the track. This wouldn’t sound out of place at all on a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, yet fits perfectly here, before the following track slowly builds back up to the unmistakable phenomenally fast-paced metal sound.

Undeniably heavy and powerful, yet at the same time optimistic and dreamy, metalheads and shoegazers alike should find something to enjoy here. This album is, if you’ll pardon the phrase, not black metal but bright metal.