Heavy Cloud - shore)lines

 

Released: November 21

Always one for experimenting with new structures and motifs, Heavy Cloud’s latest release is a rather interestingly formatted album. It begins with two separate long form pieces, which complement each other magnificently. Both come in right around fifteen minutes apiece and have a rather dreary and cinematic quality to them. That is, the cinema of olden days. It plays out like a soundtrack for a dramatic motion picture of the mid-fifties, playing on orchestral tropes while remaining doused in a certain level of gloominess. As the two pieces are meant to represent a slow and dutiful saunter down the coastline, it hits this mark so wonderfully that you can practically hear the fog and the grey clouded sky as it slowly rolls into the shore. These dreary tones are supplemented by odd clattering noises, squeaky wheels, and muffled voices, giving a slight otherworldly feel to this rather concrete conceptual landscape. 

The two longform pieces comprise roughly two-thirds of the album, while the remaining third is filled by several shorter pieces. Where the first two pieces felt like long walks down the coastline, these pieces provide a more vignette type of atmosphere. Short concepts with less in the way of dynamic structures, instead focusing on singular concepts wrapped up into gentle sounds. “A Solitude of Death” gives us cold and grey pads that waver and wobble, “A Solitude of Space” utilizes and unusual found sound rhythm with atmospheric ear candy all around it, and “An Everywhere of Silver” takes us us to the rain soaked roadways as we listen to the traffic slowly pass and disturb the water around it noisily. It is an ethereal experience altogether, putting the listener in what seem like normal places which become mired in the grey overcast that permeates the album.