The Living Fields - S/T
As I've brought up in a few of my recent reviews, genre mixing can be a really tricky thing. When you do it right you can pretty much create whole new and interesting sounds. Do it wrong and your band sucks at two genres instead of just one.
The Living Fields don't so much mix genres as they do push the fuck out of the boundaries of a particular genre.
Granted, what that genre is, I couldn't tell you.
They claim to be a doom band, but calling The Living Fields a doom band is like calling the Death Star a spaceship or Disneyworld a theme park. Technically true, but kind of obscuring the sheer volume of ridiculousness packed into the deal.
There's only one thing to say when confronted with a record like this: Holy Fuck.
For real. Holy fuck. This record is such a mind fuckingly good debut record that I can barely take it.
Okay, that's clearly a bit of a hyperbole, but for real. Nothing could have prepared me for this record's sheer ass-kickingness.
It's not necessarily that it's the best record I've ever heard, or anything, but more just that it came from out of fucking nowhere. Who the fuck are The Living Fields? Their website says they've never met. What the hell does that mean? They're from Chicago. Do I know them?
So here's this CD that I pick up entirely based on the internet telling me it's something I would like, with literally NO expectations whatsoever, and I wind up being assaulted by one of the more original, epic, boundary pushing compositions I've heard in a long time.
Describing their sound is going to be pretty difficult because they're such an amalgam of different metal influences. Let's give it a try:
Take the music of "The Mantle" era Agalloch, add some "Enemy of the Sun" era Neurosis to it, toss in some traditional doom a la something like Reverend Bizarre or Candlemass, drop a combination of guttural growls and ridiculously over the top power metal shrieking over the whole thing, add a whole bunch of pretty cool samples and textures, and you have The Living Fields.
Got all that? The weird thing is that it works WAY more than it doesn't.
There are a few bum parts. This is a first record and they're still clearly working out the kinks. For example, the record is absolutely slathered with some kind of weak sounding synth keys. There's one part at the end of the second song in particular where there's like a synth viola solo that just sounds tacky.
Having said that, however, I can't think too many debut records I've heard by a totally unhyped band that has impressed me this much. I was totally caught off guard by this shit, in the best way possible. I hope that the next record they put together continues to improve on the formula while smoothing out the few rough edges the album has. This band is one to watch, and this record is one to get right now if your into this kind of thing.
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login or register to post comments Submitted by herry on Fri, 2010-07-30 12:09.