Review Summary: "Sons: remember your fathers"
This last March, Damien Master’s father passed away and in his memory the Colloquial Sound Recordings patriarch composed for him an EP under his A Pregnant Light moniker. The EP, entitled
Rocky, is a more-or-less typical affair for the project, featuring Master’s trademark “purple metal” style of echoey punk shouts, melodic blackish metal and emotionally weighted lyrics stretched over 21 minutes of new material.
While
Rocky doesn’t tread much new territory for the project stylistically, it is interesting its structure; while only twenty minutes in length, the record flows from one track to the next, its individual pieces all purposefully linked to function as a single “epic” track. While it would be crude to compare such a short project to that of Edge of Sanity’s 38-minute magnum opus
Crimson, Master’s EP does seem to tread some of the same ground in addition to its “one-long-song” concept; in addition to suddenly incorporating acoustic instrumentation into his otherwise electric purple metal template,
Rocky also seems to make a point of varying its style and tempo across the entirety of its runtime and subsequently never allows itself to become stale or repetitive.
Outside of this epic structuring, though, it’s a stylistically normal affair for A Pregnant Light: basic chord progressions (generally a lot of tremolo riffing) in the rhythm department, catchy melodic playing on the leads, echoey vocals just raw enough to be black metal but uttered with an attitude solely describable as “punk.” Add some rock ‘n’ roll vibes and acoustic guitars for emotional depth and you’ve got yourself A Pregnant Light. Now, while “complicated” has never been a word much used to describe Master’s metal releases, it’s never had to be; his simple style, in general, just seems to
work and appropriately so provides the perfect vehicle for shouted lyrics full of emotional weight and solemnity.
And despite treading little new ground, A Pregnant Light’s newest release is unsurprisingly yet another solid slab of purple metal in the ever increasingly consistent Colloquial Sound Recordings catalog. Even though
Rocky is clearly not intended to be a miniature “black metal
Crimson” and doesn’t even try to be, it still coulda fooled me.
“Goodbye, Dad
I’ll see you in the next life
I’ll always be your son”
RIP
