Review Summary: I hate your smile, bright like the sun
Slowly, Forever’s opening track “It Comes In Waves” boasts a song title that contains multitudes. Its brief yet powerful lyrics weave an anguished web of numbed sorrows, traumas repressed by substances and touch that has long been devoid of any sort of intimacy. Sonically, however, the song is an entirely different beast, with the first minute gliding over distant acoustic strums before drowning underneath stacks of gazey distortion. It’s a hell of a way to make an entrance, and Bliss Fields hardly stop there, serving up an addictive collection of shoegaze-adjacent emo tunes that are equally warring and wounded.
While guitarist Scott Downes introduces the listener to the album’s environment on the stunning “It Comes In Waves”, bassist Meg Boni adds a whole new ethereal layer to
Slowly, Forever’s sound with her vocals, providing extra punch to the jaunty “Satisfy”, and soaring above Downes’s harmonies on “Clementine”. These early cuts would threaten to blend together and lose their identity in the hands of less accomplished songwriters, but the belief Bliss Fields have in their music is palpable through the tenacity of their performances.
As the record progresses, its pace gradually freezes over to a midtempo crush, and the band elect to wear their nu-gaze influences on their sleeve much more prominently. “Sleep” and “Away” present as two emotionally polarized sides of the same coin, the latter a song that likely wouldn’t feel out of place at the end credits of a late ‘90s high school drama, and the former a cold howler of a tune that dreams of emulating Nothing’s bleaker moments and comes within inches of its target. “Stare” features a more understated vocal delivery from Boni, but it may be the best she has to offer on the entire tracklist, snaking gorgeously around her own twisting bass fills, swirling reverb, and Leigh Fisk’s pounding drums in the distance. The gargantuan title track is the apex of this descent into grit, aggressively drowning the listener in walls of sound while still allowing for a sliver of sunlight to remain visible underneath the mud.
It’s remarkable for a debut album, but not without its fat in need of trimming; a handful of tracks end with superfluous ambience that aims to deepen the record’s atmosphere, but instead only deadens its momentum. The same can be said about the puzzlingly incomplete “Cycle” and “When We’re Together”, genuinely intriguing sketches of songs whose rising action unfortunately never saw the light of day. In spite of these shortcomings,
Slowly, Forever is a praiseworthy debut from a gifted group of musicians whose future is nothing but bright, and the abundance of great moments within its runtime only suggest greater moments to come.
