Sleeping Peonies — Rose Curl, Sea Swirl

Genre mixing and matching. One of my favorite things in the world, especially when the genres are so far apart but the artists can make them seamlessly cohesive. In Sleeping Peonies' case, we are talking about black metal and shoegaze to put it plainly. The only other band I've ever heard do this very well was Crooked Necks, and I am kind of biased because my good friend is in that band.

I think the safest way to make my way through reviewing this album is to pick apart the instrumentation rather than the tracks. All of the tracks sort of flow together and there is no ridiculously obvious difference between each of them as far as style. That is not a complaint, just a observation.

I will go ahead and point out this album's biggest flaw first and foremost. The drums. I do appreciate and enjoy the actual composition of the beats. Lots of those generic slow black metal blast beats which I enjoy. The writing in the drum department is actually pretty diverse. However, it is all obviously programmed drums, and I cannot get past the stale, bland, generic sound of them. Although whoever was programming them knew how to use the dynamics function, they still sound so beyond amateur. It practically ruins the album for me. I do not mind electronic drums but I wish they were either heavily processed or REAL. In order to continue this review, I will attempt to ignore the awful and obnoxious, corny, 90's pile of drum patches providing the backbone for this release. Bleh.

A lot of the synth sounds (piano and harp emulations as well as ambient pads) on this release are quite generic as well, but I thoroughly enjoy them. There is something about those Tangerine Dream-esque, 1998-era trance patches that appeal to me. I know that many others will agree with me considering the boom in recent years of the pseudo-retro drone and "hypnogogic pop" movement. (Please, no hate mail for that term. I use it light-heartedly.)

The vocals are very tortured and lightly buried. They are definitely black metal style, but they are so emotive and pained that they just about cross into contemporary "screamo" territory. That is not a bad thing at all because that is what I grew up on. I want to be able to feel what the vocalist was feeling when he wrote and recorded. The more pained the vocals sound, the better. Lots of mid-puberty voice-cracking and tormented howls from the depths of the forest, all engineered at fairly low volumes and buried in reverb. Great stuff.

The guitar and bass sounds are utterly superb. Extremely distorted, annihilated with fuzz. Very thick and dense. Just as any shoegaze or black metal album should be. Occasionally the guitar will go into melody territory, providing some sort of lead to decorate the crammed muck of these songs. There is not much else so say about that.

The compositions of these pieces are perfect. The people/person behind this project was very effective in instilling a depressing, melancholy, often tragic mood in the listener by the melodies and root notes that carry this material along. Almost everything is in minor or harmonic minor. Modes that almost always are meant to sound depressing and sad. Sad music is my forte and my weakness.