Album Review: Predatory Light - Death And The Twilight Hours
Reviewed by Sam Jones
It’s pretty spooky that, soon after 20 Buck Spin announced Predatory Light’s first album in many years, this album became available for me to review. I took the chance. Formed in 2011, with members from New Mexico to Washington, the band released a few Demos in 2014 before their first real Split in 2015 alongside Vorde. However, a year later, the band would release their first self-titled album before fading into absolute silence. There wasn’t some period of breakup or anything like that, they simply didn’t do anything. Only very recently has the band revved back into life and signed onto 20 Buck Spin no less, which effectively guarantees a lot of people’s attention, myself included. So let’s take a look at what Predatory Light will be unleashing on audiences for the first time in a few years. This is Death And The Twilight Hours.
A massively eerie sound is what people will be met by. The way the band allow their sound the full freedom to project outwards is on full display for the audience to experience. The record doesn’t just explode with energy right from the opening seconds, the band give their sound time to slowly mount and build until they’ve reached a point where that cavernous, echoing aesthetic has reached its apex; only then do the band truly begin their assault. But with that said, the band allow their sound to move out in all directions and yet it’s very easy to trace the lines in which their sound moves. Their riffs and production hasn’t resulted in a crushing affair here, it’s a performance that can easily rest on your senses. Riffs strike with macabre power and the intensity they need to provide for such an extreme metal record, yet they’re not doing so at the expense of the audience’s ability to simply enjoy what they’ve crafted. Predatory Light therefore guarantee repeated listens because the audience will learn of this record’s easy approachability.
The actual style of riff delivery plays a role in the album too. As mentioned prior, the album features a springing and light guitar tone which counters against other band’s heavier and more deafening soundscapes. But with that said the actual guitar work is worth a mention, as the riffs focus on what I could only describe as an Arabian-inspired riff performance. If you were to imagine sounds of ancient Arabia and Middle Eastern aesthetic, the riffs and particular guitar work seriously embodies that idea. It has this twisted take on One Thousand And One Nights, taking something older than civilisation and looking beyond, past it’s furthest recesses. What it accomplishes therefore is a sound that’s familiar and inviting to us, whilst possessing its own identity which these days isn’t an easy thing to pull off. I especially enjoyed how subtle the songwriting is, the band don’t throw an absolute slew of notes at us instead focusing on what would be the most effective way at projecting their sound to us.
I enjoyed the balanced track running the record presents us with. They open up with a thirteen minute opus, their longest piece, and then come back with a six minute song before giving us another fairly elongated track. The album only features four tracks yet it still runs to a total of 38 minutes, so while it’s perfectly fine to feature longer songs should their prowess for songwriting enable them to do so, it’s not like they’ve just dumped a block of longer tracks first and then hit us with more conventionally sized works. By spreading it out between a longer then a shorter track following suit, Predatory Light ensure their audience won’t be grated down by a slog of songs. With that said however, their longer tracks are rather engaging and never run into pitfalls longer songs may fall prey to; the songwriting is forever fluid and moving from one place to another without obvious breaks in the pacing to enable typically slower playing. The band are playing from start to finish without taking any typical steps at slowing down, it’s forever moving at a steady pace whereby the audience can follow the band’s motions.
The vocals on the other hand are a predominantly blackened style, yet while I’m not usually a big fan of black metal vocals they come off with strong vitriol against the Arabian-styled riffs. I think, had the guitar work been much more crushing, and the record’s production leant further towards a compacted, walled in sound, the vocals would be far more cacophonous and in our ears than what they are. Instead of the vocals targeting our senses and piercing them head on, it’s like they envelop our ears and wrap around them which makes for a more comforting experience than if the vocals were to harness that more screeching form. Within the mix, the vocals are also situated quite nicely so that the audience may experience them without difficulty but they’re not so far forward that they dominate the instrumentation; we’re able to thoroughly enjoy the atmospherics, songwriting and vocals equally.
In conclusion, this is a completely unique extreme metal record that I am confident is going to surprise, just as much as it’ll enthral, audiences. The Arabian-inspired riffs and songwriting is very different to what we’ve come to expect from extreme metal, I myself was expecting something compacted and deafening on the senses but Predatory Light pulled out something different here and gave us a record that’s going to make a lot of people curious. This is the first full length release from the band in six years so I’m hoping that longtime fans are going to be very welcoming to this record; while I can’t predict their reactions to this record owing to my having not heard their first record, I want to believe Predatory Light will turn a few heads when this officially releases, it deserves it. Eerie indeed.
