Customer Reviews

Skyshaper

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Following the stellar "Northern Light", Covenant speed up the bass drum yet again making a more dancy album like United States Of Mind. They still retain the beautiful, cold melodic sound that made Northern Light such a wonderful album. Ritual Noise is a great opener and very danceable, as is the rest of the songs on the album. Greater Than The Sun is a pretty dark track, with rumbling synth bass and Eskil's monotonous low vocals(he actually sounds kinda scary in this song). Happy Man is short and sweet with a nice melodic keyboard pattern. Anthems like 20HZ really make this album a winner. Totally worth repeated listens. The lyrics are pretty much of the same caliber. Some song have a only a few lines, like Sweet and Salty and Happy Man, others many. They still arent completely coherent, but hey thats Covenant. I always thought that Apoptygma Berzerk, VNV Nation, and Covenant ruled the EBM genre. But now Apop is really bland cheese-pop, leaving only VNV and Covenant to reign supreme. There are too many bands in the genre and its hard to listen to a lot of it cause its the same bass drum/distorted vocals/raver-esque synth lines over and over. Covenant add a very earthy, organic feel to their electronics and can actually convey emotions quite well through music otherwise meant for dancing. Skyshaper is just that: Beautiful emotional music that you can dance to. It is a very mature and "fun" album. Can't really say too much else because hearing is believing. But to the uninitiated, this is Covenant's best album, second only to Northern Light, which I think is their crowning achievement. I also recommend you get the Ritual Noise E.P. because it has two extra bonus tracks that were made for Skyshaper(The Island and XRd5) and they are great songs. That way you could burn a copy of Skyshaper for yourself with the bonus tracks and have a longer album? Either way, Covenant is the best band in the EBM electronic scene, always bringing something new to an otherwise repetative and uselss genre. Get this if you like melodic electronic music. It is a must have. Nuff said

***I'm reviewing the Limited Edition version that includes a bonus disc. Amazon.com, as of this writing, doesn't have it in stock yet and therefore no place for me to post this review, so I'm posting it here.***

"Skyshaper" took me a few listens to really get won over. It's a natural progression from "Northern Lights", with a touch of "United States Of Mind". It's a great album for Covenant fans, but I don't know if it'll win over any new ones.

The whole album is pretty solid, filled with mostly clubby dance tunes ("Ritual Noise", "Brave New World", "Pulse", "The Men", "Spindrift") along with a atmospheric, mid-tempo groover ("Greater Than The Sun"), a ballad ("The World Is Growing Loud") and a few that are out of Covenant's norm (the odd Moog driven "Happy Man", the harder-than-usual "Sweet & Salty").

"20 hz" is my favorite track, and could possibly be one of my favorite Covenant songs of all time. I could listen to it all day. I really love the raver synths at the beginning, then enters a rhythmic sample of someone struggling for breath as if to embody the struggle to survive in the Big City, as portrayed in the lyrics ("... people come and go, so many different faces, as the city passes by, I watch their tired eyes, journeys never made, broken dreams of leaving, fill the streets with dust...) Then the killer bass synth comes in, along with the 4/4 bass drum, and as soon as that snare drum starts hitting half way through the first verse, it's all over. Get down and boogie already. This song is worth the price of the CD alone.

The three song bonus disc, unfortunately, is fairly lame. The first song is an instrumental called "Subterfugue For 3 Absynths" . It's as pretentious as it sounds as it's 42 minutes of pretty much the exact same rhythm/synth line with only subtle variations. I can't even listen to it all of the way though, I made it about 10 minutes in before skipping around, finding out that it hardly changes, and then skipping it altogether. Either this is genius at work and I'm not seeing it or it is musical masturbation. Either way, I don't want to listen to it. The second track, "Relief", is a standard song with vocals and it's decent. The third track is a remix of "Ritual Noise", I like the album version better. Not too keen on most remixes anyway.

The packaging is great, a lot of black, white and grey colors are used in the design. The booklet features lyrics, photos of the band as well as landscape shots of Iceland. But what really does it for me are the liner notes for each and every song, as well as a foreword reflecting on the entire album. I loves me some inner thought. I'm not sure if this booklet is the same as the normal version.

No question Covenant is the Depeche Mode/New Order of this new order of techno bands and SkyShaper doesn't disappoint. With one foot always on the dance floor and the other heavily into crafting a song, this is a great effort by the band.

I particularly enjoyed the constant references to travelling, either by car or train and this continual need to capture movement is executed brilliantly by this band. (Remember Helicopter off one of their older albums?)

They even loosen up a bit and sound remarkably like the Magnetic Fields on "Happy Man" with a bouncy, mid-tempo techno song that has Covenant sounding like I've never heard them before.

This is a band that is confident with their musical directions and with each album they expand further beyond the repetitive, overly programmed multitude of imitators in their genre.

This CD is great, I've been looking forward to it for sometime. This CD is beautiful! Nice club tracks such as: Ritual Noise, Brave New World, and Sweet & Salty are trapped in my mind. I can't get enough of these tracks.

But I do admit, with such great talent that this band has, I do miss there pre 2000 sound. My all time favorte is "Thereman" -We dance to the sounds of sirens..." I remember dancing in the mornings to that song as I was getting ready for school.

Although there music is not as dark as before, but they have mastered their sound and I hope to hear more from them soon.

Where do dreams go when they die?

-stray1760

I am a fan of Covenant , I always was. Never I have been let down by their music and I rate very high their releases named : Sequencer, Northern Lights and United States Of Mind.
Skyshaper is a bit slow for me , not quite what I expected and Ritual Noise sounds too familiar , almost if I heard it on one of their older albums. I think that is the problem that it sounds not cutting edge enough as with the previous releases. Maybe time will pass and I grow to like this album more , but so far I did not think of playing it too often.

This is disappointing cd. maybe 2-3 songs here are ok , but the rest is anything but ok. i really don't know what happened to them since their last album "Northern Light". that was a great cd , but the current just isn't good enough . from this band i've expected a lot more than this false release. believe me - you do not wanna spend money on this one.

I am somewhat disapointed with this release from Covenant. It is a somewhat boring repetative group of songs. The only song on the cd that seems to stand out for me is Brave New World. The lyrics on most of the songs are really fairly simplistic, and the music doesn't stand out as anything really innovative. I like Covenant quite abit, so as I said I was expecting more from this release. Northern Lights, and Untied States of Mind are much better Cd's than this. I can listen to to it, but I don't find myself being drawn to listening to it like I was with the previously mentioned Cd's from Covenant. Happy Man is decent, but very very simple. Ritual noise, and Sweet and Salty are to repetative. AS I said Brave New World is the best track on the Cd. I don't really find any of these to be Club floor killers. Overall worth buying, but don't expect to much from it. Of course this is all just my opinion.

Wow, I was amazed when I came here and saw all the negative reviews. While I appreciate everyone's entitled to their own opinion, I find it difficult to imagine how anyone who appreciates this style of music could consider it a sub 4 star album. Personally, I was blown away by it's clean synth lines and its beautiful sonic textures, I only own 2 other Covenant albums though I have other works by bands such as VNV, APB and Assemblage 23 and I feel compelled to say that is easily one of the, if not the, most beautiful album in the "genre" I have heard. ( Appreciating the folly of tying this in to any particular genre ).

Joakim states in the liner notes that "...to my imagination it brings forth dream sequences: standing in a field at night talking to the stars; walking the streets of a city watching the shadows of the buildings paint their abstract patterns on the sunlit pavements; compelling the unsen and unknown powers of Heaven to lend a helping hand in times of need; megalomaniac visions of summoning lightning from the careless sky..." and I can understand entirely where he's coming from with that. Indeed the overall mood is entirely more epic than some of the floorfilling numbers of their previous works, the simple, hypnotic beats transcending more than the simple need to fill a dancefloor and instead invoking powerful imagery, and stirring the senses of the listener.

I've yet to listen to the bonus disc, though if the what a previous user said regarding Subterfuge for 3 Absynths is anything to go by ( 42 minutes of a synth line with little variation ) then I think I would like nothing more, at least, if the sequence is as majestic as the rest of the album :D

I enjoy this band and I find them to b e one of the more interresting bands in the futurepop music scene. Songs like "Brave New World" and "Happy Man" have the whole futuristic take on what was once called new wave...these two songs along with "20hz" are the stand out tracks on the album. Not as good as United states Of Mind...but ok. Thress solid stars. For fans of VNV NATION, ASSEMBLAGE 23, DEPECHE MODE, AND ONE, and SEABOUND.

This just may be my least favorite Covenant album, it's not that it's bad, it is just very mundane. There are a couple of good tracks on here, but most of the songs are instantly forgettable and just blah. And the songs that are good are really not stand-out tracks, they're just good and nothing more. So overall I would call Skyshaper an average album. It seems like all the old EBM / Futurepop stand-bys are faltering, it's sad to see Covenant being added to the list. The album flows nicely, but it's just so boring I could not take much enjoyment from it.