Sunbather | Loppylugs

Submitted by Matthew Baker on 3 April 2014 - 7:34pm

Cover:

Artist:

Deafheaven

album-ID:

a_147

Nationality:

USA

Year:

2 013

Release-year:

0000

Num-of-tracks:

Track-listing:

Dream House*Irresistible*Sunbather*Please Remember*Vertigo*Windows*The Pecan Tree

Length-in-mins:

Nominator:

Bean

meeting-ID:

m_57

Now-num:

2 014

Spotify-URL:

2kKXGWaCEl06EKZ4DxBJIT

Grooveshark-URL:

Sunbather/9015885

Short-title:

sunbather

nominator-ID:

u_2

Meeting-date:

Thursday, 24 April 2014

MusicBrainz-URL:

8a061d0e-fa0c-4571-91ff-8bc3911b6428

Wikipedia-URL:

Sunbather_(album)

Spotify-link-type:

album

Metacritic-URL:

sunbather/deafheaven

Discogs-URL:

Deafheaven-Sunbather/master/559132

Allmusic-URL:

sunbather-mw0002537857

rdio-URL:

Deafheaven/album/Sunbather/

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reviewers-IDs data

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70

reviewed by

Neil Hornsey

You have to admire the vocals

3-4-5-6

Officially pigeonholed as Black Metal, this album in reality falls confusingly between several other genres, and at the end you're not quite sure what you've just listened to. It's far more mellow than you realise after the first couple of listens, it's not all just hardcore vocals and thrash guitars. It's well structured with some epic and very invigourating tracks, but falls short of being outstanding simply because overall it isn't quite musically exciting enough.
70

reviewed by

Glyn Lewis

Lazy Sunbathers

2-6

5

This sort of black metal vocal technique is striking at first but with the words inaudible and melodies redundant, it is a pretty one dimensional sound - expressing rage and not a lot else.

Without conventional vocals the album is essentially an instrumental one, this is a proper challenge for any band. I think they do come up with some clever balancing of sounds, there's a mix of approaches and effective use of samples. Where I think they fall short is in delivering some proper musical development in their writing. Please Remember starts with various sound effects, feedback and drilling sounds, these assault you forcibly, building up a head of steam before breaking into a bright, strummy acoustic guitar riff. So far so good, and I can't help admitting it reminded me a bit of the approach Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album. However, the riff then never really goes anywhere and just carries on to fadeout. Likewise, on Irresisteble another nice sounding chord change cycles and cycles, in fades the piano’s take of the same theme. All very clean sounding and emotionally fantastically well charged but, again, mising any progression in the theme itself.

Windows I thought was a great one – full of atmosphere, clever samples with the religious spiel pitched at a perfect level to make it very creepy and threatening, good work guys.

Overall, yes it is well constructed with some well timed switches in direction but is lacking that bit of compositional ability that might make it warrant all the acclaim it seems to have received.
48

reviewed by

Richard Norbury
40

reviewed by

Matthew Baker

Just deaf, not deaf offenders?

I read about this before I heard it, and the description (shoegaze + metal) sounded a lot more interseting than the reality when I eventuially listened to it. If the vocal style were different it may have been more palatable.

An unrewarding listen.