A Crown Of Light — The Clearing

It’s admirable and some times rewarding what A Crown of light attempt on their first album The clearing- to make a soundtrack to a short story text dealing with madness and macabre rebirth. Mixing togeather dark ambient, environmental sound elements, noise and  blacked guitar feed back.

The problem is it comes off feeling mostly a little hit and miss, interesting elements don’t seem to stay long. But dull elements, that seem rather uninspired adventures in sound scaping and trying to  sound sinister- hang around too long.

The story deals with the once institutionalized  Espin, who is now back in the community and trying to live a normal live, but it’s clear he is far from well. Though the album we follow his descent into madness and his final macabre and rather puzzling ending. The ten tracks last from under a minute to one over twenty minutes.  Sadly it never really full achieves the feeling of declining sanity, that the texts mention. It feels too often just a mishmash of samples and gloomy tone, with little or no flowing elements. We’re left with a passable example of dark ambient & noise concept album, but with too little depth of atmosphere,dread or insanity.

There’s some interesting ideas and elements here, with the story been well enough written- though possible trying to be a bit too clever and cryptic for it’s own good. Sadly there’s not enough here to really make you want to visits The Clearing very often.