The Dead Yesterdays — Fleeting Moments Of Grace

Fleeting Moments Of Grace features two around twenty-five minutes of bounding, baying, and brain-rattling walled noise from this Scottish project. Going from both memory/ the projects Bandcamp this is the first new work from this project in three or four years.

Like much of the scenes output these days this comes in the form of a digital-only release. Cover artwork-wise we get a decidedly moodily psychedelic swirled blend of liquid & flame-like textures. The album is released directly on the project's own band camp here 

First out of the gate is the title track- which is the longer of the two tracks coming in at just shy of the twenty-six-and-a-half minute mark. The ‘wall’ is constructed around a mixture of rapidly rolling to battering lows ‘n’ mids, generally cascading juddering, and most interesting/ distinctive these very faint/ distant harmonic tones. The noise elements are most certainly the key focus here- the distant elements you can never fully define/ understand, but there is a feeling of both atmospheric to uneasy soundtracking about them. The way the elements are brought together really does pull you in more & more- feeling akin to making your way through a roughly overgrown forest at nighttime, with you just ever so often capturing faint glances of the moon through the dense tree-cover/ fog haze.

The other track here is “Beyond Absolutes”- and it comes in at just under the twenty-five-minute mark. This is built around a wide buffeting billow & smaller rattling grain. Like the first track, there is quite a vast/ epic feel to proceedings- though this time around there is no harmonic/ mood set undercurrent. And I feel these are somewhat missed- as initially I was enchanted enough by the track, but by the fifteen mark this has very much started to wane…. sadly the textures just weren’t appealing/ original enough in their own right.

In finishing I’d say Fleeting Moments Of Grace is very much of two halves- the first title track is most captivating, and the second track is less so. So, I’d say it’s certainly nice to have The Dead Yesterdays back- it just would have been better if both tracks were of the same quality.