Customer Reviews

In a Dark Tongue

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Well, Steve Von Till has always been about doing his things DIY and completely in his own style. The same goes for his latest album. This album is space/drone rock at its best! The songs are long, filled with fuzz guitar and layered tones and harmonics. If you listen actively, then you wll hear all the complicated nuances and effects-simply amazing. This is the type of album that you can lose yourself in. What an amazing piece of art! I know that Steve simply makes music for himself and if you like it also, well, thats a bonus. I like it and I think that you will too! If you like space/drone rock i.e. Sub-arachnoid space, Grails, recent Jesu, Nadja,Tarantula Hawk etc.. then this is for you! Don't think twice-get it!

This album is good but unfocused, and because of that, a little disappointing. I bought the album hoping that it would make for a nice headphone trip, an aural portal into another world, where I could hit play on track 1 and basically zone out for an hour or so with no effort needed for fiddling with the track select button in order to keep the mood consistent. Tracks 1-3 serves this purpose very well, with three beautiful, delicate, yet stimulatingly discordant offerings right in a row. At that point my perception was transported to another realm, with my brain eager to hear what was up ahead.

Then Track 4 happened. The song "By Wind and Sun" in and of itself is a decent enough offering, though I would argue that it has no place on this record. Its essentially the stylistic polar opposite of the first few tracks, and is in a totally different direction than I intended to be going in. The crashing drums, the repetitive vocals, and the heavier guitars basically destroy the delicate architecture that my mind was creating up to that point.

Track 5 gets things back in the right direction, but not long enough before track 6 ruins the mood once again. "Eibhli Ghail Chiuin Ni Chearbhail" like track 4, isn't a bad song, it just doesn't really fit with the majority of the album. Its intense focus on a very realized melody feels out of place to much of the record's more drone approach to songwriting. The extremely happy mood is totally opposite to "by wind and sun" while at the same time sort of betrays the eery beauty of tracks like birch-wood bower. The differences between these three songs are so stark that the casual listener might think they were played by three totally different bands.

The rest of the album sort of evens out stylistically at this point to the end, but unfortunately the damage has been done in regards to flow. Another weak point is that the later tracks tend to be a little too similar in style, which actually can get a little taxing on the ears and mind. In this regard, I feel that Steve should have maybe cut one or two of the later tracks from the final product.

With all my complaining and criticism, I still feel this is a strong album. The stuff that I like, I REALLY like, and there really is no "bad" song either. I just wish the artist would have been more consistent in maintaining the mood and flow of the track listing, as well as having the resolve to keep the entire effort under a hour in order to maintain listener interest. I highly recommend this album to people interested in the soundscape/ambient genre, just be aware there might be some track skipping involved in order to maintain a particular mood. Do what I did and make your own version of this album using the playlist feature of your favorite mp3 player.

By the way, hawk of achill is a monster of a track. Absolutely awesome.