Review Summary: Salvage Architecture is an astonishing debut album 6 years in the making.
Daniel Tompkins is one busy man it would seem. Between recording and touring with Tesseract, Skyharbor, and White Moth Black Butterfly, Dan has found the time to finally finish the debut album of one of his many other side projects, Piano. After 2 EP’s (Monogamy Is Encouraged in 2005 and The Valediction Of Verse in 2008) and a 6-year wait for a debut album, one must ask, was the wait worth it?
The answer to this can be summed up in three simple words: yes it was.
Salvage Architecture is one massive album that will keep you enthralled through it’s 50 minute running time. This is mainly due to the fantastic instrumentals as well as Dan’s stellar vocal performance, coupled with some exemplary production done by Dan’s fellow Skyharbor-mate Keshav Dhar.
Instrumentally, it’s immediately apparent that Piano are trying to do so many different things simultaneously; a bombardment of sounds are thrown at you underneath Dan’s vocals, which in all honesty should not work out as well as it does, however at no time is this overwhelming. This is primarily due to the amount of time spent developing and writing this album. Chief song writer and guitarist Chris Haywood said of the album, “All in all, Salvage Architecture represents what must be well in excess of 1000 hours of hard work and constant experimentation, with influences ranging from Placebo, Glassjaw, Isis as well as classical and jazz music.” The amount of time spent developing the album explains how the band can transition from heavier tracks “Dust to Dust” to lighter, soft key songs “Neptune”. Vocally, there’s quite a lot to be found. Falsetto’s in “Neptune”, haunting vocal melodies “Disappearing Ink”, great vocal layering scattered throughout the entire album, as well as Dan’s well known cleans.
Piano’s debut is one massive album; there’s constantly so much going on that it’s near impossible not to stop and marvel how they manage to pull it off so well. The quality of both the vocals as well as the music is astonishing to say the least. Salvage Architecture is quite a stunning debut from a band that has a very bright future ahead of them. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t take another 6 years for their next album.
