Everyday Dust - Shrouded III

 Released: June 6

The third entry in the Shrouded series is expectedly dark considering the subject matter. But the specific tone is incredibly foreboding throughout with much more focus on specifically organizing the sound and adopting a looser and more free-form approach. With the said, there’s a lot to digest throughout the album and even within specific tracks. “Heresy,” the longest track on the album feels more like several pieces cleverly stitched together to make a twisting and convoluted journey that opens up with dark and morose atmospheres but slowly evolves into something nightmarish and tense. Something akin to strings play out a harsh staccato that gradually increases in pace until hitting a moment of tension shattering crescendo that  sends the track into a dark simmer. It’s an incredible amount of evolution and misdirection for just a single track. 

But there are some tracks that are a bit more straightforward such as the opener, “Make No Bones.” It uses some ethereal sounding strings to craft an atmosphere of gentle sorrow - nothing overly morose - to set the scene of what we are walking into. It feels bleak, of course. But there is a certain element that feels almost persevering in the face of whatever dark territory we find ourselves in. Later in the album, “Wreckage” fulfills a similar role, although in different instrumentation. It’s hard to describe exactly, but this one has a certain kind of low fidelity aesthetic to it as well that really makes it stand out. It almost feels like we are hearing the whole thing through an incredible old phonograph, complete with all the weird intricacies of the medium that make it sound limited in volume and range. The album ends with the loudest and more erratic of tracks, “Smokescreen,” which is a bit of a surprise that we are sent out on such a chaotic scene but I appreciate the misdirection of it all.