The first track from their upcoming album was released this evening, and it is predictably exquisite. Starts with four minutes or so of Deafheaven business as usual, ie full on hammering drums, black metal shrieks, and shoegazey metal guitars, then it goes all classic Thin Lizzy for the middle section before winding down to a gorgeous slow, chiming, lengthy cinematic outro. I know most of you are going to hate it, but it’s the best thing I’ve heard in months, horse staggers and all. It’s brutal, shimmering, happy, melancholy, beautiful, and exciting. I’m already past the mandatory six listens, and can’t wait for the album (July 13th! It has a terrible title!).
And the video is just lovely.
Kid Dynamite says
It’s times like this I wish @bingo-little still posted here.
Ahh_Bisto says
“*”
*remembers digging out Scenes From The Second Storey last time he listened to Deafheaven.
Kid Dynamite says
ooooh, The God Machine? There’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time…a long time. (Nips off to iTunes…)
Wilson Wilson says
Gah, I want to like Deafheaven more than I actually do. Musically this is right up my street, but the grunty vocals and the too-busy-by-far-double-bass-drum metal drumming leave me cold. Last couple of minutes are lovely though.
Kid Dynamite says
I don’t really listen to the vocals as vocals, if that makes sense. I treat them as another instrument, part of the overall sound picture if I may get a little pretentious about it. There are lyrics accompanying the video on YT, but I am blowed if I can make out any correlation between what’s printed and what I hear. And it doesn’t matter!
retropath2 says
I can’t help hearing Honey Monster: What about the honey, Mummy.
Otherwise?
Fine.
Ish.
(Disclaimer: I have a couple of Saor records, where they mingle that with bagpipe and fiddle. It is a long long way to rock and roll…..)
The Good Doctor says
It’s good this, but I can’t help feeling I need to see these live for them to really click with me so I’ll try and get to see them.
They remind me a lot of Jesu (Justin Broadrick of Godflesh/Napalm Death) who do that shoegazey / metal thing – except he’s not screaming his lungs out – far from it, but I kind of like the fact he sounds like he’s singing softly against the noise – like someone making a phone call from half way up a mountain with wind and rain whipping around.
Vulpes Vulpes says
You’re only partly right.
I hate the first seven and a half minutes, with a passion. It’s ghastly. Seven and a half endless minutes which seem to consist of a teenage testosterone racket over which unintelligible gibberish is screamed by someone who sounds like they are really really really angry that they can’t wriggle and shake themselves free of their straitjacket. Someone that, in all fairness, I’d be damn glad was in the straitjacket if I were anywhere in the vicinity.
Then there’s that gloriously languorous extended outro that you mention, which gleams with warm sunlit pleasantness and that deep jasmine fly swatting crepuscularity we only ever experience maybe once or twice a year in the UK as a really cracking August afternoon fades into dusk. Which is just lovely.
Kid Dynamite says
*wink* I feel much the same way about your post as you do about the song itself – to wit, the first two thirds or so is nonsense, but the ending is triffic, evocative and lovely.