Review Summary: A tepid rendering of a dark night of the soul.
My Epic’s musical journey over their decade-plus time together has been one of great passion, repetition, and drastic attempts to expand their artistry. While none of it has been entirely unfruitful, the intentional recounting of musical and lyrical themes can tend to be a thorn in the North Carolina’s band side. Lead singer and songwriter Aaron Stone has wrestled - and wrestled hard - with the Christian experience, weighing everything from God’s existence to humankind’s approaches to togetherness. These themes are rife with implications that reach a very personal level for both Stone and, clearly, My Epic’s passionate fanbase. They are presented in such a human and sometimes painful way that they become the very focal point of the music.
The band’s 2011 EP, Broken Voice, found the band departing from the crunchy and ethereal tones of their debut LP, I Am Undone, and the thrilling pummel of guitars on its follow-up, Yet - and this departure felt everything but natural. While not an ounce of the band’s passion was lost in their uncommonly folksy approach, replete with acoustic guitar layers and mournful string and pedal steel passages, it felt forced and overlong. It showed a welcome triumphant tone to the band’s usually dismal sound but even that felt like a hollow attempt at brightening things up a bit. Through all the warm delivery of comforting melodies were decently written songs, strung out far past their necessary run times and composed of awkwardly-melded acoustic and electric balladry. (The EP’s best track, hands down, is a fantastic rendition of Thomas Ken’s 1600’s hymn, “Doxology.”) This EP comes off as a sort of attempt to shake hands with a softer side of their audience - or maybe themselves, as musicians - but showed the first musical crack in their career so far.
A handful of albums and EP’s later, My Epic has seen fit to make another crucial change to their repertoire. Though this one is far more in touch with modern musical trends, the same problem that blunted Broken Voice’s impact stands here. Their typical ear for an ethereal guitar line and thundering drumbeat is exercised in full and Stone’s vocals sound as fantastic as ever (which has always been the group’s calling card), but the group dabbles so heavily in electronics that it muddles the output. Shimmering synths dominate the instrumental found in the well-mixed but mostly aimless “Voices;” Stone’s angelically high vocals are slathered in a near-incomprehensible level of reverb and slippery effects in the opener “Of Wilderness.” The majority of these five tracks all feel like loving efforts to both quiet and intensify the band’s overall voice but often force all the band’s power into isolated moments, including Stone’s powerful lyricism. “So Be It” features perhaps the most forlorn interpretation of faith in all of the band’s many interpretations of it: Stone wails over the bridge “I can’t tell the difference between my curses and my prayers / When all I can say is / Well, so be it…” This one moment of surrender and resignation may encapsulate the band’s overall mood and is so lucidly delivered, making me wish that there was more of that to behold here. While we do get about as much spiritual wondering that can be expected from a My Epic record, so much of it gets lost in the mix, both aesthetically and literally. “Of Wilderness” hangs its hat on the central lyric “I think we’re all lost ’til we’ve walked in the wilderness” - alluding possibly to the Old Testament tale of the Egyptians wandering through the desert under Moses - which brings about a robust theme of ascetic spiritual discovery but never seems to continue this point. The song speaks in frustrating circles where the stronger songs on the EP do not, with lines like “If no one speaks back, are you sure someone’s listening?"
The most concerted examples of the electronic and heavier elements come in the EP’s two final tracks. “In Absentia” shows the EP at its absolute best. Stone’s vocals take the spotlight, mostly unencumbered by effects aside from some excellent layered harmonies, backed by bright guitar arpeggios, trembling synth lines, and a strong rhythm section. Every musical passage of this track perfectly frames Stone’s pensive and defeated declarations of being lost: “I don’t hear you, I don’t hear you;” and “Like the darkness, like the darkness.” The track culminates in a cliffhanger of sorts. The instrumentation drops out all together after a brief swell and leaves Stone on his own, his voice echoing like sad birdsong over a canyon. “Two Nights” is a guitar-driven and massively moving closer. The verses feature two excellent guitar lines, one distorted and cranked to eleven and another silky with reverb, mirroring the extreme battle in the lyrics: “I’ve searched for all my life, it stayed just out of sight;” “There’s a vision in the violence.” It is here and here alone that the lyrical theme of “ultraviolet” is explored, explaining that the spiritual world can only be seen through a certain lens though it may dwell in the world as we know it. While this theme being explored more thoughtfully throughout the EP could have been a more gratifying experience, its strength hits hard on this track.
“Ultraviolet” was released as the first half of a two-part EP series (followed by “Violence” in 2019) and feels like an inessential but still listenable opening chapter to a project. The majority of the group’s motifs are represented on “Ultraviolet” just as they would be on any of their other albums but in a noticeably diminished capacity. The final two tracks stand on their own as bold statements of their sound, meticulously crafted but retaining the sonic and lyrical rawness of their ongoing mission to peel away religious thought to leave only a core of true faith. However, it cannot be ignored that the majority of the album is just too polished and out of step with My Epic’s identity.
