Review Summary: On their third album, Palaces doesn’t just hunt the sun. They wrap a lasso around it and drag it to earth. Scorched Earth be damned.
There’s a meme that exists on the internet in which a young person asks their mother to buy them something on brand. The mother replies that this thing exists at home, at which point the meme shifts to a lesser, poorer version of the desired product. The meme’s purpose is two-fold: it is used to a) portray a scenario that every young person who didn’t grow up in a well off household can relate to and b) it is used to insult something that is considered a cheap knock off of a more name brand product. We’ve got Slipknot at home, but it’s really Sleep Token. We’ve got Dr. Pepper at home but it’s Dr. Dynamite. The list goes on and on.
It’s important to acknowledge that this meme exists because it is inevitable that this album and band will be written off by some as a cheap knockoff of Remission-era Mastodon. The comparisons are understandable. The album was produced by Mastodon’s Bill Kelliher. The band is from Atlanta. They play a mix of sludge-y/ progressive metal. It’s warranted that some of you reading this will stop at this point and move onto the next album.
But if that were the case, I wouldn’t be here, spending my time writing a review for an album none of you would have checked out anyway. Despite the fact that there are elements of Mastodon and Converge embedded within the DNA of this album, Palaces comes across as an angerier, weirder younger brother. It’s an album that proudly wears its influences on its sleeve while also establishing itself as the product of a collective who sound more like a supergroup than the small, local act that they are. Sunhunting is an onslaught of gritty, disgusting, violent metal riffs strong enough to peel the paint off the walls of your local, beer soaked rock venue.
If there’s anything to sell you on this album, it's the sheer energy on this album. Driven by three unhinged vocal performances (shared duties of guitarists Eric Searle and Steven Mclaughlin, and bassist Jeremy Weeks) and Jonathan Balsamo’s manic drumming, each song punches above its weight and commands the attention of the listener, from the punk riffs of opener “No Restraint” to the jolting, thrash of closer “The Almost Toucher”. Despite the eclectic mix of styles on this (the title track is a proggy ripper that would have been the best track on Mastodon’s “Once More Around the Sun”, “Gumby” sounds like the heaviest Tremonti song in a hot minute, and “Place of Life” bare knuckle boxes with anything off of Converge’s “Love is Not Enough”), Palaces manage to find a bridge between genres that allows their own unique writing style to shine through. Where bands like Neurosis have released what many consider to be the best metal album of the year, Palaces threatens to compete, if not steal the crown from them, with an album that is as heavy as it is catchy, as refined in craft as it is raw.
On their third album, Palaces doesn’t just hunt the sun. They wrap a lasso around it and drag it to earth. Scorched Earth be damned.
