WORDS Brian Carroll PHOTO Deafhaven
Metal is finally, at long last, absolutely beautiful. Sweet, triumphant, and poignant, armed with some of the most elegantly-conceived chord progressions in recent memory, San Francisco five-piece Deafhaven had grown weary of all the macho posturing and darkness pervading Satan’s one-time genre of choice and focused their energy to make, in their own words, a “lush and rock-driven, even pop-driven” record. This statement of intent, while seemingly nonchalant as a descriptor, must have been a risky choice to make given the baggage of the metal genre, and on the record it shows. Song after song, the band barrels, skyrockets, and catches fire over and over again with a go-for-broke and uniquely brave creative spirit, one that will positively transfix and captivate new listeners. The record is an astounding success, and the band’s gambling experimentation has been handsomely rewarded in the press.
At the time of this writing, Sunbather is the best release of the year according to the legion of critics on review aggregate site Metacritic.com, and the fifty seventh best-reviewed album EVER RELEASED, sitting pretty between classic albums from Tom Waits and Woody Guthrie. Actual people like it too, as the disc consistently receives well-deserved perfect review scores from curious music lovers just tuning in. Like them, I hadn’t heard of this band before Sunbather started making waves on the internet, and while curious, I only knew that the album was supposed to be filed under black metal - that fuzzy, quiet lo-fi sub-genre intimately followed by the coolest of the cool. So, it was somewhat a relief to learn that, no, this is not black metal, heavy metal, or barely metal of any sort.
Nay, Sunbather is a gorgeous post-rock beast, in the vein of too-easily forgotten bands from recent memory like Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Explosions in the Sky, energized for maximum beauty like the prettier, uptempo songs from a Dan Deacon electronic record like Bromst. Stripped of the trappings of routine metal sound (and accompanying imagery), Deafhaven newly depicts metal as a fantastical creature: the last feathered, giant, navy blue polar bear, its great arms and claws striding the arctic tundra at high speed before naturally taking flight and disappearing into the night sky among the Northern Lights.
Awash with the sort of singular notes played at a rapid-fire rate popularized on Radiohead’s OK Computer and Dick Dale’s version of “Miserlou” that opens Pulp Fiction, the disc makes a constant effort to release itself, to find peace through burnout, and to express in music the brutal, noisy poetry of the human experience and the modern reality of its possible extinction. Holdout sounds from the “old days” of metal include screaming vocals on nearly every track, but they’ve been thankfully buried in the mix and reduced to nothing more than a reedy whisper, a stylistic norm in black metal. Also hanging on for dear life in this complex hybrid of rock styles are the double-bass pedaled, tumbling drum rhythms of your average heavy metal band, but these, too, take a quiet back seat to melody and serve the best purpose possible, which is to propel the sound constantly forward at a blistering clip.
A couple of ideas lifted directly – bluntly – from the aforementioned GYBE and Explosions in the Sky will distract or comfort the seasoned post-rock listener depending on their tolerance and forgiveness of outright theft, but the disc has enough less obvious “borrowing” - like brief interludes of extremely subtle hip-hop-based, dark mystery that would sound at home on a Flying Lotus record – that these parts come off less like rip-offs and more like an earnest, transparent attempt to continue the themes and tricks laid out by those bands. By the end of the album, you might find yourself a little worn out, as its consistently high-energy epics occasionally hover around and over ten minutes in length, but luckily the band includes frequent rest stops in the form of pretty piano segments, field recordings, and plenty of atmospheric production to keep things from coagulating into a terribly formulaic, samey affair.
Highly recommended for post-rock lovers, but perhaps too commercial for strict black metal enthusiasts, Sunbather sounds immediately classic. If you think you might like your rock and roll speedy, dreamy, triumphant, cathartic, over-the top, and serious, you’ll find this is a lovely monster of a record. The sound Deafheaven has crafted here has been confidently chiseled from a familiar stone, so you may only need one listen to “get it,” but by all means, it is well worth that listen and more.
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