Categories : Electronica, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 4 / 5 Reviewer: Garth Paulson |
The Sound of Animals Fighting aren’t the first band to mix the beautiful with the destructive, but they’re one of the most effective. The multi-headed, collective beast has a true knack for toying with listeners’ expectations, flitting through a series of sounds that all manage to work together, despite often coming out of left field.
On their latest album, The Ocean and the Sun, it’s not uncommon to hear delicate Latin guitar, multi-layered vocal harmonies, chilling electronics, spoken word and explosive riffage within the same song. The whole affair can be disorienting at first listen—sounding more like a confused mixtape of the bizarre than the work of a single band—but the bewilderment soon turns to wonder as the group stretches what shouldn’t work further and further without ever hearing a rip. They achieve this formidable accomplishment by continually maintaining two base camps to which they can safely return: lush, atmospheric pop that can encompass their melodic leanings and fierce, blistering metal for their harshest elements.
The only real issue with The Ocean and the Sun isn’t that these two foundations are necessarily in conflict with each other—though the push and pull between the band’s desire to write a lullaby and just tear everything down can be thrilling—but that listeners might see them as such. Despite how delicately, and deliberately, The Sound of Animals Fighting navigate the discord within their own sound, it’s likely that most listeners will identify more with one side rather than the other. Some will wish the band would stop disrupting the beauty with all that metal shit and others will wish they didn’t have to tread through so much openness to get to the action. For those who can appreciate a bizarre, uneven middle ground with a diverse and constantly morphing landscape, though, The Ocean and the Sun should be well loved.
