Best of 2021

 2) Dream Unending - Tide Turns Eternal

Tide Turns Eternal is the kind of record I want to write someday. That isn't to say I have the ability to, but when listening to albums sometimes they just click and you think, "These guys are doing what I want to do." The smart thing to do at that point is to dig in and study it, try to figure out all the influences, try to get familiar with the music theory underneath, and most importantly pick up the damn guitar and practice for a couple hours.

Trying to break apart why this hits so personally, I'm left thinking about the contrasts. This, on the surface, sounds very much like a sorrowful doom record, but reading through interviews I see this from one of the songwriters, "It’s a hopeful record, there’s a real life-affirming thread that runs through the whole thing. We wanted to lean more into that. There’s enough downer stuff out there, that’s just not what we wanna do."

There's also a tendency to lean on dissonance a lot in the chord progressions, but then toss a really melodic lead on top of everything, making the dissonance seem to melt into something bigger, something beautiful. This is an incredibly interesting skill, to be able to take something ugly and say, "See this ugly thing? It's not actually ugly, you just didn't look at it closely enough." This is an album full of beauty, mystery, and skillful deception and it's their debut, so hopefully this isn't just a little project and I can look forward to more from these two guys.