Label: Robotic Empire
Up until now, Reuben Sawyer has been known mostly for his fantastic illustration and design work under the Rainbath Visual moniker, but that’s going to change very quickly as a result of this album.
Held Above is the first album proper by Hollow Sunshine, in which Sawyer takes care of instrumentation/writing duties alongside vocalist Morgan Enos, and it is a sublime achievement. Like the similarly-minded but entirely different sounding SubRosa and Jesu, Hollow Sunshine combines doom metal sonics with melodic indie rock sensibilities, creating music that on the one hand is sludgy, distorted and impossibly heavy, and on the other harkens back to the best nineties indie pop, grunge and shoegaze bands.
Beneath the layers and layers of distortion, these songs are simple, accessible pop tunes, like the Dinosaur Jr of yesteryear, down-tuned and fed through an extra line of noise pedals. Sawyer churns out catchy upbeat chords and Enos lays down sweet simple melodies with a relaxed delivery that falls somewhere in between grunge and My Bloody Valentine.
This whole album is a smattering of seeming contradictions, and yet it all comes together to create an astoundingly consistent whole. There are the ethereal, floating vocals that drift and swirl in a narcoleptic heroin drone and then soar in wide-awake pop celebration, there is the crushingly deep guitar that manages to traverse the sonic spectrum from some of the heaviest, undeniably doom-y metal riffs to sparkling major-chord arpeggios without missing a step, and there is the way all these disparate elements are brought together into what are pretty much three minute pop songs that will still make you tap your foot and hum along.
Reuben Sawyer and Morgan Enos have found a way to get drone, doom, sludge, ambience, experimentalism, and metal to the masses, without sacrificing an iota of quality, and they’ve written a perfect pop album in the progress.
New Comments