Review Summary: No it never gets better.
Aeterna Tristitia is Joey Brown, a free-thinking 17 year-old with a passion for art, love, and life. Sputnik's own Joey has been making music for quite a while now, under several different monikers. This particular one is Aeterna Tristita, his most recent project. While this is his third album, it is also a self-titled, and it certainly deserves to be the album that he named after the project, as this is the most ambitious and impressive effort he has recorded yet.
The whole album is surrounded in a dark, and bleak atmosphere. While the songs come and go, the universal theme of the album never leaves. There is something lurking inside the music, Joey's ghost is around every corner of every note. The lyrical themes surround depression and anxiety, very relatable feelings for me. I find myself feeling strong empathy as I listen to the words spoken and sung in Joey's deep and booming voice. Listening to this album is making me so lethargic that this review is becoming increasingly difficult to write.
Every part of this album is human. Everything feels organic, everything feels as if it was created by a human, to be listened to by humans. It doesn't feel foreign, it feels right at home. This album is how feel when you lay down in your bed heartbroken and lay awake for hours. This album is when the person you love doesn't want any part of you. This album is how you feel when you don't feel like living anymore, and it is beautiful.
The majority of the music is recorded on a keyboard, accompanied by Joey's echoed deep voice singing his depressing lyrics, but the album also features guitars, usually with a certain "twinkly" vibe to them, while retaining the dark atmosphere that is used in all of his songs. He also makes great use of crescendos, especially in the song The Devil Speaks, my personal favorite song here. The song builds up higher and higher, before cutting out everything but one piano riff, and then the riff cuts out, and everything explodes back onto the song at once, creating an epic climax, with Joey chanting over everything, and after that climax ends one piano riff comes in and while I expect Joey to start singing seductive sexy lyrics about sexing me up in my butthole, he instead talks about the devil and how he speaks to him.
The album ends with My Resignation which is a fitting title for a closer to such a depressing album. To be honest, I didn't expect to love this album as much as I did, but after a single listen I was blown away. Joey has crafted the greatest album of his career, and shows potential for his compositions in the future.
"I once saw a light but it faded away."
