
Don’t get me wrong: Rift is a good album, and certainly has potential to please enthusiasts of the genre. The guitar lines are slow and dense, and displays quite a gracious and discreet aggressiveness, with walls of sound that cohesively builds around its own calm highlight an atmosphere of tense, but lucid expansion. On the other hand, their music is so saturated with generic elements that you never feel too thrilled while listening to it. Certainly, the album can be appreciated with modesty – without any expectations –, but you also wish after some time for the end to come as soon as possible.
Forming the Void is a band that has potential, but they certainly have to be more audacious, and leave their comfort zone. They do what they do with amazingly competent technical skills, but they lack a more effervescent degree of passion and enthusiasm. A little monotony – or too much calmness, if you prefer – is inherent to this genre of music, but you have to push up the boundaries, at least to a certain level, to avoid being just another generic act.
If you want to listen to Rift, you can definitely do it, without any fear. This is a decent album. But like I wrote some lines above, there’s nothing extraordinary about this work. They follow their genre of choice with a certain amount of competence; but, in the end, Rift is just an ordinary stoner rock album, that ends up being too similar to many other albums of the genre.
Wagner