Deadyellow : "What Was Left of Them"

 This Philly-based black-gaze outfit seems to have taken notes from Deafheaven when it comes to which influences to sway their sound toward, to nest achieve the best sonic misery set to simmering glory while packing a punch. Much like Deafheaven, these guys owe much of their sound to Weakling. The grit and nastiness in their snarl are the most direct indicators of this. They do seem more focused on the opening track, where the second seems to be largely consumed with the fury of their blasting. They do slow down and gather themselves to focus intentions on a more effective attack as the song progresses, but that seems to be at its furious heartbeat. 

"I am a House on Fire" is a great song title, but is a timid post-rock interlude that leads up into "Katla" which howls in a more black metal fashion. There is lots of tremolo-picked guitar parts buzzing around the screamed vocals. There are more melodic parts this song wanders off into that even feature sung vocals that feel more like 90s emo. The interlude "Winds That Came" might have been time better spent as the intro to the song that follows it, though at over sixteen minutes "Fallen Trees" could not be any more sprawling than it already is. I think smarter songwriting could have easily edited down the first three minutes of the song into something that still got the point across in half the time. While things to build into a sonically heavy storm, there would have been a more prudent way to arrange this. For what it is this works off some cool sounds, but this is not a song I would ever feel compelled to give another 16 minutes of my life to. The post-rock section in the middle is cool and all, but the ambient noise it uses as a bridge could have been cut back. It feels like they crammed three songs together here. 

The title track is more of an ambient outro. While there is a great deal of hipster window dressing to this, these guys are good at what they do and are angry about something, not sure what that is. Not as depressing as Weakling or as emotionally intense as Deafheaven, but have found their own niche between the two. I am not sure this album is going to get a great deal of love from the indie rock snobs, and unless it comes out this album is like an allegory for gay rights or something as trending and topical for that side of the press to rally behind, but I will give this a 9, though doubt it will make it to my top ten Black Metal releases at the end of the year.

 

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