Review Summary: Hell, I don't know what to call this.
Simply at the prospect of free music, I downloaded All the Empires of the World’s first full-length. I expected strange music, but I never thought I’d be at a loss for an accurate comparison. Specifically, I’d like less things to compare to. If you pick it apart enough,
Blessings contains dozens of elements of everything from
Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s sans-vocals post-rock haze to the sludge riffs of
Mastodon. For the simplest accurate description,
Blessings sounds relatively similar to if
maudlin of the Well were infused with sludge-doom instead of its death metal influences.
Through its 7 tracks, All the Empires follow a strangely straightforward structure of odd soft melodies crescendoing to loud riffs that eventually diminish back down. There’s not even any vocals*. HOWEVER, the
distinction between the gentle drone and the hard n’ heavy makes the difference. If the formula seems simple now, the music certainly isn’t so.
The connections are endless.
If I were to describe the entirety of this album, I would have to make references to freak folk, gloomy
Antlers-style indie, punk, stoner rock, and even
Thergothon or
Sunn O))) doom to paint an accurate picture of this weird-ass record. ***, there’s whistling WHALE CALLS in “Ghost of Sargasso / Of the Father”. The slow sections range from ambient acoustic guitars (check “The Prophet Part II”) to
Kayo Dot-esque prog before they drain into
Isis post-metal and melo-core a la
Between the Buried and Me.
Now here’s the kicker: the best part of this album is, past its dizzying plethora of influences, All the Empires never seem to drive
Blessings off on any schizophrenic tangents. The movements are intelligently blended, if not as dramatically as, say,
Mono. The changes are simply stylistic, and the record always seems to stay just linear enough to keep “WTF” out of mind. And heck, its FREE if you’re a cold heartless cheapskate like everyone else.
*There's actually a few interspersed vocal segments in "[I Perceive Your Resonance]" that actually sound a lot like Colin Meloy of
The Decemberists.
