Blue Sky Black Death’s newly released album, Glaciers, is an hour-long amorphous, instrumental-style album. The musical composition of each track is unique and impossible to emulate. It’s pure talent and compositional knowledge that combine to form a novel, avant-garde album. It’s quite unlike anything I have ever listened to before.
Glaciers is a complicated album to review, especially because Blue Sky Black Death is notorious for their musical complexity. The easiest way to describe it is a sort of trance, with relaxed electronics and cool beats. However, the music is so much more than a meager combination of drums and bass, and to refer to the songs as “beats” would be a undermining, oversimplification and frankly an insult to the Blue Sky Black Death’s talent.
The best way approach listening to this for the first time (especially if you don’t normally listen to instrumental music) is to take about at least an hour and go lay down and relax. Close your eyes and feel the music while it’s playing. You have to listen to the vocals to understand what they’re saying because they blend in with the movement of the music so well. This is not gym music; it’s the type of sound that takes you on a journey, which is part of the reason why Glaciers is an innovative masterpiece.
A shortcoming of the album, depending on your taste in music, is that it is lengthy, seriously lengthy. Of course this is dependent on personal preference and can be a good or bad thing. If you take the proper time to listen to each track in full, you can appreciate the album more than if you only listen to it in five minute segments. This is especially essential to remember since there are only five tracks on the album, the shortest one is about 8 minutes long while, the longest is just over 14 minutes.
Each song features astounding vocals that are both haunting and uplifting at the same time. The featured artists were well picked and enhanced the music (with the exception of the fifth and final track which does not have a featured vocalist.) If you get into instrumental music naturally or even focus on the movement in the music, it gives you a flying sensation, a mixture of emotions and a sort of euphoria. It is trippy to say the least. The music itself is an ingenious combination of chants, drumbeats and embodies a distinctive tempo and mood transitions. It has an intoxicating effect.
The music keeps you guessing in its mood and tempo transitions, something that is unique about Blue Sky Black Death. Many artists don’t have the ability to do this so effectively. The music ranges from a dark form of classical to a range of synths and uplifting crescendos. One moment you feel like you’re listening to slowed vocals, kind of just floating in space, and the next moment there is a there is a tidal wave of sound and a whole new movement has begun. But there is never any pause or interruption in the melody – the transition is flawless.
With an innovative, psychedelic sound that brings a whole new style of instrumental music to the table, Glaciers really sets the bar for future releases in this genre. The nice thing is the ability of the music to reach various audiences of different genres of instrumental music – whether you’re a die-hard fan of trance or more of a classical connoisseur, Blue Sky Black Death’s Glaciers has appeal. For further listening, check out Noir, also by Blue Sky Black Death. There are nearly three times the amount of tracks and they’re significantly shorter, but is just as rewarding in creative, artistic value.
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