FFO: Persefone, Tool, Deftones, Karnivool, Haken, Hans Zimmer or any orchestral film soundtrack ever

Sometimes an artist will come along a deliver a work so profoundly similar in vision to your own artistic work you can’t help but write a redundant blog review of it. I’ve been meaning to do this for like two years but never got round it. Now that I have a blog I have no excuse. Let me preface this entire review with the following: I am absolutely fanatical about this album. So much so I wrote a 1500 word review.

I discovered this album when it still had 500,000 views whilst on a YouTube album rabbit hole, from Haken’s 1985 to Leprous’s The Congregation to this artsy painted album cover of a head and… earth inside it. With my trust fully in Google’s recommendation algorithm I figured this would be some ambient, spacey and sentimental prog djent record and so I let autoplay do its thing while I did homework.

I think I was hooked like 30 seconds in. I’ve sinced purchased the album twice, streamed it weekly, seen their goofy live performance (with the aforementioned Leprous) and have actually met with Ben and Frank, their drummer and keyboardist, both serendipitously on the streets of NYC and purposefully after planning a meetup (somehow after meeting someone from class who serendipitously knew Frank from high school).

The Muzak

A Dream in Static is geek music - make no mistake. This should be the least surprising thing about an LP from a band of music composition, production and theory graduates. What sets Earthside apart from their 7+ string, double bass pedaled, syncopation addict nerd metal peers is their focus on emotion over technicality. Think Gilmour over Govan (but with a good heap of the latter thrown in).

Earthside’s long term goal is to break into the film soundtrack industry. And it clearly shows: each track is full of soaring melodies and huge swaths of synth pads and reverb drenched guitar chords. Minor scales are pretty much all you’ll find here and the shortest song is five and a half minutes long. There are no 40 measure long machine gun riffs, and while they go hard af occasionally, chugs take a back seat to the near wall of sound they frequently support instead. There are few guitar solos and their measure count can be counted on one hand. If you’re looking for blistering bumblebee runs of unintelligible melodies then this is the wrong record for you. There is a hammered dulcimer solo, however, in Entering the Light, so you may get your fill there.

I will say though, that that riff in the title track is heavy as fuck. That was a fun one live.

Everything feels brimming with bombast yet somehow extremely tasteful at the same time. To be fair, what tasteful is in this genre is a bar often lowered by the likes of Meshuggah or Animals as Leaders, so the juxtaposition may not be as much of one. Perhaps what can be replaced for tasteful is careful - Earthside have poured years into this album. Every single note, every beat, feels carefully placed, after hours of bloody dispute no doubt. Just as I was immediately hooked by the intro of The Closest I’ve Come I found myself so comfortably along for the ride - not a single transition in this album chock full of them was less than utterly smooth. This is the work of masterful, motivated composition and speaks to Earthside’s ambition. While they do make heavy use of choruses, their song structures are sequenced like a masterful film edit - only the most groovy, heavy or catchy parts are repeated verbatim, others are revised and varied each repeat. There’s a profound sense of progression in each song and the vocals of the songs with them tell developing stories of despair, indidualist identity, self-doubt and nihilism.

This might be the most ambitious debut album I’ve ever heard. This ambition is present everywhere from their long term goals as soundtrack producers to their seeking out Bjorn Strid, Daniel Tompkins and Lajon Witherspoon as guest vocalists to incorporating a fucking orchestra in two songs that were each already complex works. A combination of business smarts (they know their targeted ads I’ll wager that much), sheer patience, vision and a willingness to risk it all shows in the scope, length and complexity of every song.

Whilst each band member on this record is killing it technically with tremolo keytar solos, syncopated riffs, tapped bass parts and more, I wish to single out Ben Shanbrom for his performance on this record. Evoking Danny Carey and Brann Dailor along with classical orchestral percussionists, Ben fucking destroys it on this album. Each song is full of his thunderous fills, groovy time-keeping and textured ambience and it’s fucking amazing seeing him pull it off live with so much force and passion it looks painful. The man hits a closed hi-hat hard. His grooves are as often kick-and-snare-and riffs (like when they’re dj0nting) as they are incorporating a ton of fills and off-beat accent/snare hits that make everything much more groovy and feel less like metal. One of my favorite chorus drum parts in prog in general is Jon Theodore’s frenetic cacophony on TMV’s Eriatarka. Shanbrom takes a few cues from this and plays some interesting atypical chorus patterns, e.g. in Skyline.

But what is most interesting for me is that in the midst of this dense, technical music is the aforementioned emotional component. Each lyric tells a story of some kind of despair or struggle and so to carry this emotional weight the band delivers absolutely huge choruses with bright, memorable and emotive lead melodies, massive backing chords and intense percussion. The singers deliver powerhouse performances - like they really truly care about the music, the words and the band’s vision. All the vocalists, including Eric Zirlinger deliver. Of note is Tompkin who just fucking hits some notes an octave higher than would already be impressive. The intermittent screams laid out by Strid or Zirlinger are also tastefully placed and carry the appropriate punch when they occur, delivering climactic moments of angst.

One complaint perhaps remains: that this record is, while beautiful, quite dark. Unlike Haken, Karnivool or Tool or any band one could fairly compare Earthside to, these guys seem uninterested in exploring emotions that aren’t almost completely bleak. The most uplifting song is The Closest I’ve Come, and that one doesn’t even have vocals. Some more groovy or upbeat or more uplifting tunes could have provided a more interesting, varied package. Still, what the band set out to do, they did incredibly.

The Production

The sonic space in any given moment on this record is filled with synths, bass, vocals, guitar and drums - standard fair for sure. But everything is mixed so fucking well its shocking.

But it’s not really that shocking. Production and mixing were handled between Jens Bogran, Johan Örnborg and the band themselves. With a pedigree of pretty much every big prog metal band, it’s entirely expected that every instrument is perfectly audible, that theres no sibilance and no muddy bass tones. I think this is a perfectly produced record. Vocals pop where they should, with layered choruses filling up the space with some magically perfect amount of reverb and compression. The guitar chugs are warm but pack a punch with the kick drums and bass, whose softer parts are also perfectly audible. Lush synth pads, bright bells and Vangelis-like leads fill in the space remaining.

There’s not much else to say. This is one of my reference albums for my own production.

The Wraps

I have a strangelu sentimental attachment to this band. Perhaps its mostly because they’re already making the music I want to make. Every time I show I my friend Samarth my works-in-progress he points out the Earthside in it. Even songs I wrote before I heard the band. I’ve listened to this album when I felt lonely and sad as shit walking around in New York. I listen to it in the gym when I’m ecstatic from running. I listen to it on the way to class. I listen to it for inspiration. Not just for what directions to take my compositions in or how to dial in my bass tones, but how ambitiously to think about my personal projects in general. I listen to it for kicks when I wanna hear some nice ch0gging or virile screaming. I’ve heard it in almost every state of mind I’ve so far experienced. I’ve loved it in all these capacities.

So for these reasons and others, this is my favorite album of the year and my favorite debut of any artist.

Score: 10/10