Kylesa – Ultraviolet (Season Of Mist)
Savannah-based powerhouse Kylesa released their sixth album to date this May. The response was a slew of mixed reviews and receptions from the metal community and the indie rock community at large, as this album certainly encompasses a lot more than straightforward metal.
Kylesa – Ultraviolet (Season Of Mist)
Savannah-based powerhouse Kylesa released their sixth album to date this May. The response was a slew of mixed reviews and receptions from the metal community and the indie rock community at large, as this album certainly encompasses a lot more than straightforward metal. The band released their first, self-titled album in 2002; a vicious, stoner-tinged punk onslaught featuring the welcome breath of fresh air that is Laura Pleasants, a female guitarist in a crusty metal band. Since then, they’ve gone through many lineup changes, one tragically resulting from a band member passing away, and experimented a lot with their sound.
Their last three records have been released on the label Season of Mist, and have been a lot more spaced out and psychedelically tinged that their more straightforward first three releases. Ultraviolet in particular seems to cast conventional metal and sludgy crust punk by the wayside in favor of some serious musical experimentation, which sometimes works in their favor, and other times leaves a lot to be desired.
I don’t usually like to borrow words from other reviewers in my reviews, but I have to pull a quote from Grayson Currin of Pitchfork in this instance, as he used a phrase that, in my opinion, perfectly sums up the problem with this album. He said the band has “let their genre pillaging overtake their actual songcraft,” which is a beautiful way of saying that when you try to cram too much stuff into one song, or even one album, you get a weird mess instead of something innovative and cool. Phillip Cope of Kylesa has actually explained the scarab beetle imagery on the cover as relevant because beetles make things out of big piles of crap. This, along with the fact that the album was an experiment on which the band members took liberties with their instrumental duties and played different things on different songs, makes me think that this entire album was a musical foray that fell flat.
Some of the songs on the album are actually pretty solid. ”Long Gone” is a straightforward doom song with some neat, spacey female vocals that are mixed way in the back. “We’re Taking This” is one of the songs they released as singles before the actual album, and it has the heavy, plodding rhythm and driving guitars of older Kylesa songs. “Grounded” was another one of my favorites; it sounds strangely a lot like Down, but they pull it off and manage to work clean female vocals into a super-Southern-sounding song without it coming off at all like dad rock.
Despite all that, the rest of the songs are somewhat hit or miss–more often miss. It’s first noticeable on the second track, “Unspoken,” when things kick off with a lame nu-metalish intro that doesn’t fit in at all with the band’s sound. “Steady Breakdown,” one of the later tracks, might be the worst song on the album; it sounds like a ripoff of Mastodon or Torche with a really obnoxious chorus from Laura: “Like a shell that’s made of glass, did you really think that it could last,” repeated over and over again. The rest of the album is passable and somewhat listenable, but too often it just sounds like they are trying to be as singsong happy as Torche or just pay tribute to Pink Floyd in a half assed way. There are definitely a lot of weird moments when the vocals are cheesy, the guitar sounds like it’s being played by an amateur, or the drums seem a little off beat.
In the long run, the album sounds more like a somewhat-related playlist than a cohesive collection of songs by the same band, and it feels like a chore to listen to the whole way through. While there are some good songs, and there’s a chance those who love genre-hopping or happier metal in general may really enjoy this, I wouldn’t recommend this at all for the diehard Kylesa fan hoping for a new chapter in their legacy, or even for those like me who never considered the band a favorite but always respected their work. Maybe next time, they will forgo some of the antics, hop back on their rightful instruments, and make an album that is a bit more true to form.
