doom
It's always a pleasant surprise when you combine two things which on the surface should not work together, yet form some alchemical witchcraft and combine to produce something greater than the sum of their individual parts. Take chill and chocolate for example, both very nice things on their own, but combine them and magic happens to elevate this new substance to even greater heights.
This happens sometimes in the music world. Truth be told, it's happening more and more often now bands seem to be disregarding genre tags with gleeful abandon and mashing all kinds of disparate sounds together to form sweet sweet music (but not always, sometimes it just sounds terrible, but that’s for another day). This wonderful alchemy I've been harping on about is exactly what I hear when listening to the new album by Milwaukee resident Keith D and his artistic outlet Arctic Sleep. The musical portions of the album were written side by side with his beloved cat Yoda , who sadly passed away whilst writing the lyrics to the album. Yoda's passing and Keith's dealing with this death are all over this album. The juxtaposition I talked about at the start of this review comes in the form of these two separate entities. The music is doomy and really quite heavy, whilst the lyrics are sweetly sung and uplifting.
There is something very relaxing about this album, even though at times it strays into quite riff heavy doom music. I pick up some Junius vibes at times due to the aforementioned heavy music and soaring vocals, although the music here is more progressive doom than post metal though. Listen to the opening track 'Meadows' which covers everything which makes this album so good, the soaring vocals, the chugging riffs, both of which work so well together in a synergy as good as anything, say for example chili and chocolate.
When sitting down to review this album, I was going to break each track down individually and wax lyrical about it, there are times when this is a good approach and other times like in this instance, when it's just better to listen to the music instead. What I will say though is that this is Arctic Sleep's best album to date (which is saying something as they are all very good, you really should listen to the back catalogue) and if you like dense, moving and heavy music, then you owe it to yourself to give this a spin, you won’t regret it.
Simon
This happens sometimes in the music world. Truth be told, it's happening more and more often now bands seem to be disregarding genre tags with gleeful abandon and mashing all kinds of disparate sounds together to form sweet sweet music (but not always, sometimes it just sounds terrible, but that’s for another day). This wonderful alchemy I've been harping on about is exactly what I hear when listening to the new album by Milwaukee resident Keith D and his artistic outlet Arctic Sleep. The musical portions of the album were written side by side with his beloved cat Yoda , who sadly passed away whilst writing the lyrics to the album. Yoda's passing and Keith's dealing with this death are all over this album. The juxtaposition I talked about at the start of this review comes in the form of these two separate entities. The music is doomy and really quite heavy, whilst the lyrics are sweetly sung and uplifting.
There is something very relaxing about this album, even though at times it strays into quite riff heavy doom music. I pick up some Junius vibes at times due to the aforementioned heavy music and soaring vocals, although the music here is more progressive doom than post metal though. Listen to the opening track 'Meadows' which covers everything which makes this album so good, the soaring vocals, the chugging riffs, both of which work so well together in a synergy as good as anything, say for example chili and chocolate.
When sitting down to review this album, I was going to break each track down individually and wax lyrical about it, there are times when this is a good approach and other times like in this instance, when it's just better to listen to the music instead. What I will say though is that this is Arctic Sleep's best album to date (which is saying something as they are all very good, you really should listen to the back catalogue) and if you like dense, moving and heavy music, then you owe it to yourself to give this a spin, you won’t regret it.
Simon
