Lord of Hounds:
Gave the album a test spin on the headphones. A real moody overcast day here in the northeast USA, which is the perfect backdrop for this work (and night would be just fine as well!). Crunchy guitars, walls of sounds of keyboards of all shapes and sizes, odd time riffs abound, all within a cinematic-type soundscape. This sucker is DARK, so if your canary just died, you might want to hold off on spinning this one until after the burial and you have your shit together. But in all honesty, there are rays of sunlight just barely peaking through at times amongst all of the black and dark grey clouds, so the album is not entirely without a sense of some optimism, but its certainly not the focus of
Hounds. The emphasis here besides the catchy melodies, nifty harmonic progressions, is always on sound and mood, as if every texture and colorful timbre is purposefully placed, and placed for a reason, not by chance. The studio post-production effects are used brilliantly, never a heavy echo or thick reverb without serving the composition.
The biggest compliment of all that I could serve up here (for me personally) is that Batts and Co. welcome you into their dark and sometimes twisted universe in which the listener can easily get lost in. The closest parallel I could make would be akin to a Tangerine Dream album, albeit stylistically they can be quite different, but from an aesthetic standpoint there are some similarities. I'm going to refrain from saying that this album sounds like "X" or "Y" because that may do its originality a disservice, but I will say that fans of darkish Scandinavian prog/prog metal and/or the more electronic-leaning elements of Krautrock ought to check this out. Fantastic job to John and Co, and I sadly cannot make ProgDay, but will be curious to see how this material will translate live. I'm sure it won't sucketh!
Congrats Ephemeral Sun.
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