Sun Devoured Earth - Good Memories Are The Hardest to Keep (2011)

Band: Sun Devoured Earth
Country: Aizkraukle, Latvia
Style: Shoegaze/Atmospheric Black Metal
Label: Independent

Within the last two years or so, this one man project has released several albums and EPs to varying degrees of success. While his fanbase is one that keeps growing thanks to his mixture of atmospheric black metal with a shoegaze base, he is still fairly unknown to a lot of people. This is his first full-length of 2011.
I'll say it once again that this is the first time I've ever listened to an entire album from this project, so I can't really compare it to his previous work, but from what I have listened to before, this new album has a much clearer production style. This is not a typical heavy album, and most of what is black metal on here comes in only during the climax of most of these tracks, for the most part, this is an instrumental post-rock/shoegaze release that is more fit for daydreaming than headbanging. The main instrumentation on here is upheld by soft, clean guitars that can pull you into a different headspace if you're not careful.

The clean guitars that for the most part, fill up what could be considered the "heavy" portion of the band's sound, while the distorted guitar and bass take up the role of rhythm in most cases. The softly sung, or spoken, vocals really add to the dreamy nature of this project, as they don't really intrude on the music, as much as they sort of just add to the atmosphere on songs like Show Me The Road to Joy. Though the black metal element rarely takes hold of entire songs, but when it does, you get tracks that meld the beauty of the softer moments with the more aggressive nature of the black metal, hear Death Before Reaching The Sun. Now, I'll say that most of these tracks are solid and that they hold a nice, dreamy atmosphere that should please any fan of ambient influenced genres, but there are some tracks on here that just sound like filler to me and those are the tracks that otherwise break up the flow of this album, for me a track like How Was I Supposed to Know is a key offender in this case.

Overall, it's a decent album, not great, but not bad, it's alright. I know that there are definitely people out there who will be able to get into this a lot more than I have. If you like dreamy, kind-of-metal, shoegaze stuff, check this out.
Overall Score: 5.5
Highlights: Waiting Until Death Takes Us, Death Before Reaching The Sun, God Is An Asshole