Ethereal is what comes to mind when listening to the drifting beauty of Sleeping Vllage's debut
Fragments. A black/post metal outfit from Italy, Sleeping Village combines dreamy shoegaze with dark black metal undertones, and long, brooding tracks with haunting yells into the night. The production is muffled and hazy like a lot of black metal and it doesn't really take away that much from the album.
Fragments shifts rather cleanly from expansive doom and gloom to beautiful clean passages led by some truly gorgeous guitar melodies. It may not knock you on your ass, but
Fragments is a journey into the beauty of darkness that holds its own among other black metal releases this year.
"My Quality Of Being" begins things in the manner in which
Fragments works. Haunting yells for help underneath waves of solitude create a vivid depiction of a torture chamber, in a dimly lit basement of a cathedral. The haze gives way then to a wonderful clean section with guitars that sway into the night sky and lovely drum patterns that keep things on edge and off balance (in a good way). The song continues this give and take of torture and beauty until right near the end where the song goes off in a slightly different tangent that almost sounds like it could have been taken out of a Slowdive song. Almost dream-pop like, "My Quality Of Being" fades out into nothing and ends as mysteriously as it began.
Almost everything on
Fragments just works. The album has this aimless edge to it at all times. The songs seem to flow with almost no conviction and yet there's an underlying sense of desperation and fear and a feeling that something terrible is always right around the corner. It's as beautiful as it is ugly, something that is showcased the best on "Yet Longing For More" where almost noise-rock qualities give way to such beauty and open endedness that gives
Fragments a curious feeling.
Whichever way you look at it, Sleeping Village have created an album that can simultaneously haunt and fill your eyes with wonder on how haunting things really are. The beautiful clean passages are a nice break from the muffled black metal haze that engulfs the album into darkness. That's why
Fragments works: it's either an album you will listen to in a graveyard or blast on a night drive home, as luminous scenery passes by you.
