Review Summary: The beginning of the end.
Loneliness. A feeling everyone knows, whether it was simply the first time they were left home alone, or if they were abandoned by somebody they trusted. But how does it feel to
truly be alone? You could ask Michael Collins, the third astronaut on Apollo 11, who briefly lost all communication with Earth when his spacecraft orbited around “the dark side” of the moon. However, that’s only as far as we can go in the real world. What about fiction? How would it feel to wake up on a distant moon, hundreds of years after crash-landing, only to find that the satellite you’re walking on is melting beneath you? Look no further than A Slow Descent’s most recent EP,
Secrets of a Melting Moon, for the answer.
The album follows up the story from
Dance With Me Upon His Secret Ocean, where a female astronaut awakens centuries later on Europa, one of Jupiter’s biggest moons, only to find that the ground temperature is warming up to the point where the ice that once enveloped the satellite is a boiling ocean. Desperately seeking answers and aid, she follows a strange transmission to a gigantic space station, only to find it abandoned and out-of-shape. Crestfallen, she wanders about the Europan landscape, pondering on how the colony could’ve fallen apart. The answer will come to her soon enough, however…..
It’s somewhat difficult to really describe the music, since, in essence, it’s just ambient droning. However, just like on previous releases, ASD manages to put together these pieces of ambient noise and create very atmospheric and intriguing compositions. Most of the tracks on here are much shorter than on said previous releases, and the EP is only five tracks long. This could be seen as a negative for some, as the story is pretty long for such a small runtime. However, it can also be seen as a positive, because there is absolutely zero filler to be found here. No track feels out of place, and the story flows remarkably well, especially compared to ASD’s last album,
Utopias, which, while still an excellent album, felt very jumbled and inconsistent in its narrative. The ambient noise becomes darker and more intense during the more pivotal moments, then reverts to calmer and quieter keyboard sections during the buildup, allowing for a more immersive and realistic experience.
To be quite honest, I could probably ramble on about how each individual song is a metaphor for some sort of emotional struggle within today’s world or some nonsense like that for hours. But instead, I’ll leave you to go through the journey yourself. With this EP, A Slow Descent has once again cemented his reputation as an excellent ambient/post rock project, and I can only look forward to his next work.
