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*Comments:

1.   Darkyard
2.   Cro-Magnon Nightmare
3.   I’ll Die, Goodbye
4.

Total playing time: 23:17

Release Date: October 31, 2011
Label: Handshake Inc.

The Sun Through a Telescope - Summer Darkyard

Reviewer: Chris

November 23, 2011

Highly interesting with befuddling nuances, Ottawa’s The Sun Through a Telescope issues an EP unlike anything I’ve heard outside of Pink Floyd in Summer Darkyard. I’m just as fascinated by the musical devices in and of themselves as I am the arrangements and augmented brilliance of creating a truly interesting, albeit strange sonic entity. This was a very odd and beautiful trip, not to mention unexpected.

While this music might otherwise be deemed ‘noise’ or tempestuous musical jargon, it really does hold a certain charm and serendipitous quality to it. The backing sounds and creative implements smattered about touch the nerves in frightening, consuming waves that break open the senses like a cracked and dilapidated foundation. To try and categorize this music is truly not as difficult as it might appear, though it is one of the more subjective, interpretive collectives in recent memory. I hear elements of the Cure at their most dreamy peak as well as Pink Floyd at their most physiologically divisional. I find this hybrid of sound to be wholly more wondrous than some of the black metal or nu-thrash I’ve heard of late.

This is certainly one of those albums that should be heard as a whole, in order, and without any peripheral distractions. I find the true value rests in the conglomerate of sounds and strange proclivities that surround the ‘music’ at hand. The spacey, sky-treading aura of “I’ll Die, Goodbye” is one of inspired madness that defies logical convention and displays a swollen affect that really doesn’t find a label anywhere, which isn’t necessarily a negative. In the vast expansion of these 23-minutes, one might well come away with a feeling of euphoric satisfaction while others might have to hear it a few times to find even a close proximity to the intended statement. Either way you’ll certainly come away from this experience different; good or bad is entirely set upon your particular mindset. The not-so-subtle screaming over what I take as bells from a lighthouse or a dark shipyard is one of the more brilliant parts of “Darkyard”, not to mention this album. Its combination of well-constructed fear and regimented emotional release is nothing short of bravura.

While this music might not appeal to everyone, and I’m not even quite sure it’s ‘metal’ in the traditional sense of the word, it finds a crevice in your psyche that longs for such mistreated emotions to be cradled and assuaged. One does find a darkyard of summer within the constructs of this music; however, to tap into the recesses of the fragile mind and assign awakened discord in all the right places is a majesty reserved only for those who truly get this music and the totality of its raw and significant form.