Earthrise - Until We Rest Beneath the Winter Way

Angry Metal Guy 50

I came into this promo selection fresh off an ArcTanGent high. Post-metal? Sign me up! With a space rock twist, and themed around Laika, the ill-fated first animal in orbit? Interesting. Also, some gorgeous album art. And Until We Rest Beneath the Winter Way is out ten years after Earthrise’s previous album, debut Eras Lost. I’m always interested in bands that have stuck at a project that long. Of course, that doesn’t guarantee good results. But if nothing else, this should be an interesting listen.

Musically, Until We Rest Beneath the Winter Way arrives exactly as described. The post-metal core will be familiar to any fan of the genre. Long, winding songs drift from ambience through clean melodies into slow, crushing riffs and hardcore-influenced screams. The space rock influence is mostly noticeable on the ambient sections. Here you find echoey picked guitar (“From Below”) and theremin-esque radio noise (“Generation Loss”). At their best, Earthrise flow smoothly between sections. They write gorgeous melodies on clean or semi-clean guitars (“From Below,” “Tears of Burning Light”) and there are great riffs under the screams (“Generation Loss”).

Until We Rest Beneath the Winter Way by Earthrise

Indeed, listening on my commute and at work, I was pretty convinced I liked UWRBtWW. There’s some occasionally questionable clean vocals (“Our Work in the Stars Cannot Wait,” “Prisoner’s Cinema”), which can sound a little strained or off key. That aside, there’s never anything actively wrong, and there’s lots of good moments. But there was a nagging doubt: this is a 71 minute album and I sure didn’t remember 71 minutes of music. This persisted even after more focused listens. Sure enough, this is the biggest problem with UWRBtWW. There’s about a 2:1 music:ideas ratio here. While never bad, by the time you’ve reached the back half of the album in a single sitting, it’s just starting to drag. If you played me a random snippet from the generic post-metal filler, I absolutely couldn’t tell you which track it’s from. There’s an entire fifteen minute chunk across “Engineers of the Human Soul” and “Void Hymn” near the end I couldn’t tell you a single thing about. My fatigued brain entirely refuses to latch on to anything there.

The flaws are a real shame, because the highlights really can be very good. “Our Work in the Stars Cannot Wait” has a twiddly interlude which is almost a guitar solo but slowly decoheres into noise, and it’s beautifully done. “From Below” and “Generation Loss” are both good songs. The latter has great riffs under the vocals at both the 3 and 6 minute marks. The last few minutes of the former are similarly good, and follow a satisfying build-up. And finale “Tears of Burning Light” has more interesting moments than its two preceding tracks combined and sticks the landing, with a fade out to spacey noise with fragments of melody just about audible.

As a metaphor for a dog which, partway through its life, finds itself stuck in orbit dying slowly and uncomfortably with no way to mark time and no hope of escape, Until We Rest Beneath the Winter Way works pretty well. Unfortunately, this detracts from the high points present on the rest of the album. Being unwilling to cut stuff is perhaps understandable after a decade of work. But with a sufficiently brutal editor, and maybe a different clean vocalist, UWRBtWW could have been a real success. As it is, it’s the definition of a mixed record.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self Released
Websites: earthrisemn.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/earthrisemn
Releases Worldwide: October 14th, 2022

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