Review Summary: Genre-bending album, covering everything from industrial and death metal to ambient and psych.
What lies in the definition of a music genre? Usually, listeners perceive it as a neat filing of certain artists and their music into neat, strictly defined categories. But what happens when a certain artist tries to mix things up, really blurring the genre borderlines? No neat filings, I’m afraid and you have to make up for own mind whether you like it or not, neat filings or no neat filings.
If you just know in this case a band Vancouver based duo Post Death Soundtrack just by its name and album title, It Will Come Out Of Nowhere, you would think of either death metal or say some heavy industrial stuff, say in the vein of Nine Inch Nails. Sure, PDS got that and for many fans of these genres that would be quite enough. But the duo, now comprised of the original singer Stevie Moore and Jon Ierson, who joined the original duo (Kenneth Buck was there at the time) after their debut Music as Weaponry (2008) manage on this release to further broaden the mix, bringing in along with their original leanings towards Skinny Puppy and Ministry, some Seventies psychedelia as well as ambient/trip-hop leanings of The Massive Attack, Underworld and its heavier version that was Scorn, all exhibited on their second album The Unlearning Curve (2016).
After widening the band first to a trio than to a quartet, the current duo manages here to keep the scale of their sound as a widescreen picture, keeping in their lyrics the usual scorching social commentary they cultivate from the beginning, adding up quite a few personal notes along the way.
Musically, they are all over the board but are still able to create a unified musical image. Heavy sounds abound, like on the opener “Chosen Sons’ but the band manage to vary their sounds like the introduction of acoustic piano on “Crumbs”, Underworld sounding “Dark Matter”, ambient “Ramona Hills”, or even Indian raga progressions of “Benediction”, by the closer “Bridge Burner”, even listeners that do not favor death metal or industrial might be inclined to say that Post Death Soundtrack’s new album is something that they will certainly listen to again It Will Come Out Of Nowhere, dark images or no dark images.
