Review Summary: Pain, suffering and loss being made into pure art.
Everyone in the world goes through some type of trauma in their lives. Anyone that thinks life is perfect and that everything is sunshine and roses is purely delusional. Thankfully for music lovers, bands tend to take that trauma and put it into their art. Tunic is a 3-piece band from Canada and their most recent album
A Harmony of Loss has Been Sung is a cluster of sadness and misery.
The backstory behind the album is nothing short of tragic. Frontman David Schellenberg’s wife experienced a miscarriage in 2023 and that suffering is the glue that holds the entire album together. I’m not an expert on noise rock by any means but the albums I have heard were always more upbeat than this one. The uniqueness to combine heavy hitting, reverb laden chords with a simplistic gothic-esque post-punk approach immediately pays dividends. Each song really only has a few chords played, but those few chords hit you like a punch to the gut as David wails painfully over them.
The entire appeal of
A Harmony of Loss Has Been Sung for me is that combination of dark back alley riffage and the vocals that sound like cries for help to anyone listening. The hazy atmosphere created by the riffs really amplifies the depressing nature that the album is meaning to portray to the listener. It’s stunning how a band can make an album as “simplistic” as this and still have the musicianship to make it sound as dingy and depraved as it does.
This entire album is as if a dark cloud was following the band around because it was. Nobody can explain the pain of losing a child, even if that child is in utero. For David and the guys to hone that horrible energy into this masterpiece is just a huge credit to them. I’ve said it before, the pain of these musicians often manifests itself in some kind of artistic breakthrough.
A Harmony of Loss Has Been Sung is that breakthrough.
