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The compelling nature of post-metal as a genre is manifest in its extremes, not just in the shattering heaviness of distortion and volume but in the craft of its softer stretches. Scottish sextet BENEATH A STEEL SKY demonstrate this understanding well, with songs defined as much by their fragile ambience and delicate patience as by slow crushing riffs. Starting as an instrumental band during the COVID pandemic, the band have evolved to incorporate a range of vocal styles alongside the reverb-drenched instrumentation on their debut album, Cleave.
If there was any doubt as to the imagery BENEATH A STEEL SKY seek to evoke, it’s quickly dispelled by the title of the opening track: The Sky Above The Port Was The Colour Of Television, Tuned To A Dead Channel. Atmosphere reigns supreme from the first notes of sparse, clean guitar, giving ample space for introspection over the first two minutes. The first of a recurrent theme of cliff-edge transitions slams the listener with droning distortion, crashing cymbals and the first of the album’s growling vocals. Over in a relative heartbeat, it serves as a preview for what’s to come.
Follow-up Vanguard begins more conventionally, launching into a chunky slow-tempo riff, the second guitar dancing in the upper registers, and a call-and-response between surging clean vocals and growls. It’s a vast post-metal feel operating at a glacial pace, content to take its time and live within the wash of sound. After some pullbacks and reprises of the heavy riffs, the second half unfolds not into a climactic outro but a calmer slice of instrumentation. Clean guitars and toms maximise those atmospheric qualities to a calm fade-out.
The instrumental origins of the band are evident in their approach to clean vocals for most of the album. Often, these breeze across the soundstage, a surge of texture amidst the other components rather than the central component. This is evident on the likes of Everyone You’ve Ever Known, the painfully emotional melodic phrases heavily ambient in feel if not for some busy drum work. A thunderous plodding riff kicks in for the last third alongside the growled vocals – a heavy transition that wouldn’t sound out of place on a BOSSK record, albeit with a straighter approach to the riffs than that band’s blues groove. It’s an earned moment of release after the preceding desolation. Follow-up Quetzalcoatlus follows a similar playbook, initially lacking definition compared to the preceding songs, though it finds its voice in a brighter approach and harmonic tension.
The centrepiece track on the album, The Infinite Silence That Follows The Absolute Truth, is an exercise in the band’s duality. The opening minutes constitute the album’s best and most beautiful stretch: a memorable guitar line augmented with melodic counterpoints and rich ambient texture. It evokes a glorious bleakness – the feeling of watching the heat death of the universe from a life pod orbiting a failing star. That crystalline beauty is shattered suddenly, unexpectedly (albeit formulaically) four minutes in with a smash-cut to sludge riffs and screams. It’s effective, if predictable; some overlayed guitar arpeggiations add some chinks of light and despair. It’s a shame the sonic quality of the heaviness doesn’t quite live up to the preceding richness.
Cyclical Dunt takes a more experimental approach, a disorienting time signature and repeating guitar motif giving a looping feel, of spinning in the void. That motif stays in place even as the track ascends into pummelling heaviness, some light overdrive keeping it in touch with the riffs alongside more call-and-response clean and growl vocals and some ambient surges. It’s short and to the point, memorable in its uniqueness.
In case the bleak post-metal vibe wasn’t clear enough, closer The Becoming layers in sound effects of icy winds and tremolo effects in its intro. The clean vocals are played conventionally in a typical verse structure – deliberate narrative rather than snatched phrases. Its cathartic outro centres on spiralling guitar phrases, unfolding into heavy devastation that straddles the line between redemption and despair.
It can be tempting for post-metal bands to over-index on the heavier riffs in crafting their songs, with quieter sections feeling perfunctory. It’s a credit to BENEATH A STEEL SKY that their clean ambient sections are often their most compelling, with just enough salt and thunder in those heavier moments to earn their statement. At times, it’s a little over-long and over-wrought, and those heavy sections could hold more bite and memorability. But this is a promising debut from a band that refuses to compromise on both sides of the dynamic extremes of post-metal.
Rating: 7/10
Cleave is out now via Ripcord Records.
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The post ALBUM REVIEW: Cleave – Beneath A Steel Sky appeared first on Distorted Sound Magazine.