AD Ozium - In the Style of Dead Sparrows

 Released: June 9

In the Style of Dead Sparrows is an album that feels, for lack of a better word, sketchy. It has this dark and winding quality to it that leaves a shade of audible grime on everything. The variety in story tones is pretty incredible throughout as well, sometime sounding deep and distorted and other time having a surprising twangy quality to it, all of which interplays uncomfortably with the assorted noise and drone loops that surround it. There also a willingness to make things sound pained and crunchy which can first bearded about halfway through the first track, “Lifespring.” There’s a moment in which pressurized noise begins to hit so hard through the entire track that it crushes everything together in its orbit, making the composition pump intensely and almost overwhelmingly.  It’s a rather captivating moment that fades away back into the melange of noises. 

Some of the tracks take this noisy and crunchy aesthetic to an extreme, like “Whore of Sound, ” a track that gives dynamics a firm middle finger in favor of a wall of seething guitar noise that oscillates and twists in a languishing manner. But this seething mess of distortion is followed by a surprisingly sparse and cleaner track in “Music From the Opfer’s Box.” This one has a softer approach and utilizes far more tactile environmental sounds to support the twangy and meandering guitar. Now, for me, both of these tracks really encapsulate the range of the album, it veers from scathing heaps of dirt into a calmer but somehow creepier quality of twangy clean tone. By the time we reach the end of the album with “A Practical Act of Prowess,” the guitar has become more and more of a support piece compared to the raw environmental feedback and static. It becomes a pool of seething sound that sucks us into its soft, yet menacing grasp.