you think you’re going to hear, then you’ll look up the bio. But if you’re one to make a judgment call on a band based solely on their bio, without having heard any of their music...I don’t know what to tell you.

 

Alright, rant’s over.

 

My first thought listening to this was that I was going to have nightmares from the Pyrrhon review coming back to haunt me. The opening track seemed like it was going to emulate the same weird metal formula, and the production on Pale Light is stale, just as it was for Pyrron’s. It may just be something that was planned - to sound dirty and gritty, that is - but other times, it just seems like Andy Nelson and Pete Grossman tried to make everything sit so well in the mix at certain points that it all became muddled (sometimes indistinguishably) together. Both the band and production commit little faux pas, but they clearly have their well-deserved conceits, as the album is full of progressions. Obviously, there’s some real genius here: the last minute of the album’s first single, “Greying,” does something I’ve never really heard outside of my own head before. Instead of the bass being a root note that replicates a phrase emulating accessory, it’s instrumentally treated with respect, and metaphorically used as a parable from Pale Light. To illustrate the concept of voice leading, which is harmoniously opening up the next note in a sequence of using this one, and so on, I’ve concocted this description:

 

The phrase is a descending line which sounds as if Ray Charles’ bassist took Adderall, learned metal, and speed picked his “Hit the Road Jack” parts. Seriously, save for the accents and syncopation, it’s almost identical. But the point is that this descending phrase is emulated and then embellished by the guitar panned to the right channel, and then embellished again (in a completely different way) by the left channel. It’s melodic, it’s harmonious, and it’s over in 40 seconds. It’s not overtly technical as far as sheet music is concerned, but the difference in tracking and panning is just a small piece of band brilliance and studio wizardry that I really relish.

 

If you’re into the whole brevity thing, then you’ll probably enjoy this album, too. Remember how the Catch 33 and Colors albums were each just one really long, complicated song? Pale Light mimics that up to a point, too. The longest song, “Feed,” clocks in at five minutes, and the rest average a little under three. Most of them transition into another seamlessly to make the album more than just a collection of different songs. I’m sure that’s what happened here: some songs with similar lyrical content, structures, or phrases are really just part twos to parent songs, but since I can’t find any lyrics on the internet to verify this, we’ll just call it a hypothesis. It doesn’t seem like too much of a leap considering track one flows into track two; tracks four, five, and six are all seamlessly transitioned; so are seven, eight, and nine to each other; and finally, so are the last two tracks. To delve slightly further than the occasional segue of gapless playback, everything on here just sort of moves really well around everything else; the way melody, harmony, signatures, and arrangements revolve around each other in such an accordant way makes these songs more tactile without becoming too mathy or pretentious.

 

Tone can be a little bland, as can the phrasing and melodies scalewise, but most of it’s quite consonant, and although it seems like I’m putting these guys down for a lack of technicality, there are more parts than I can shake a stick at that would be quite difficult to strum along to. “Flesh to Ash,” for example, as an etude of dynamics, going from pianissimo to fortissimo and then crescendo to diminuendo, but not in that order. “Deafen” is also chock full of start/stop rhythms and polymeters to keep things from getting as dry and uninspired like many other bands of this ilk.

 

There is also a fantastic display of drumming. From a production standpoint, the drums are at least one thing that the engineer(s) got right: crashes ring bright, chinas aren’t overused and are well placed, kicks accentuate the music but don’t copy the guitars to a tee, and you can hear so much attack on the ride, you’d swear Tim Waugh was in your living room. Percussion is a tour de force in accents as snares can hit on downbeats or upbeats to completely change the feel of the songs, and you won’t really find too much double bass or gravity blasts here. Not to say it was needed; in fact, if they had, had blasts, it would’ve changed the direction completely. They probably could’ve gotten away with some kick-drum trills, though.

 

Vocally, there isn’t a lot of diversity in the way of delivery. Vocalist Tyler Brand doesn’t squeal, cry, or bark; he just goes balls to the wall in every song. It’s a weird sort of generically unintelligible scream, too, and I really hated it the first few times. But after a handful of listens, it started to grow on me. This is usually the part where I start talking about lyrics and give a couple bars as examples, but as I stated before about the band bio, their website doesn’t have the lyrics, either. In my writer’s info packet, it says the lyrics revolve around watching the earth and each other slowly perish. The only thing I know is that the vocalist is much happier with this record lyrically than anything he’s written before.

 

In conclusion, the production could have been better, but it’s fitting with the sound of the band. Although tonality isn’t a big deal to some people, it seems a little too bland for my tastes, as do the modes used throughout the album. The drumming is spot on and doesn’t show off, although it easily had the opportunity to do so. The album, is under thirty minutes, and vocally I can’t understand shit.

 

THERE! That’s my review.