Release date: February 22, 2012 | Pelagic Records/Season of Mist | Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Website
Ah, so we meet again, Acid Mist Tomorrow. When I plucked this record off the virtual shelf to place into the ASIR continuity, I knew it would get an almost visceral reaction from our team. Why? Because it’s one of the most widely celebrated (post-)metal records within the diverging flows of interests that intersect at EIN. Ever since I joined 8 years ago, Hypno5e and Acid Mist Tomorrow popped up at irregular intervals, slowly becoming ingrained in my perception of our shared cultural space. If not reflected in the number of contributors – multiple people had to drop out for various, understandable reasons – I hope our passion comes across through the power of our words alone.
Robert Miklos
How often do you get the chance to write an article about a band which you’ll see less than 24 hours after finishing said piece? It is rather serendipitous how it all lined up. It’s kind of like the universe wanted me to have my pre-concert warmup to be a writing exercise as well, not just repeat listens of the stuff I’ll be hearing. Anyway, by the time you’ll read this, I will have long since returned from said gig, but I figured it’s a very nice occurrence as far as synchronicities go, making for a good foreword.
Acid Mist Tomorrow is easily one of the greatest records I’ve ever listened to. It’s a musical masterpiece that transcends style and form. I can still say this confidently now, after nearly a decade of listening to it on regular rotation in my playlist as I did on my first time hearing it. I can also confidently say that I can’t imagine the record falling out of my playlist. I remember clear as day having some friends over on a fateful night some 9 years ago and one of them suggested we listen to Acid Mist Tomorrow, more as a throwaway idea rather than one of those hardcore recommendations.
I haven’t heard anything even remotely similar up to that point. It was one of the moments which redefined how I look at music. I remember screaming inside of my head something like ‘NOOOO WAAAAY THEY’RE ALLOWED TO MAKE MUSIC LIKE THIS?!‘ I was immediately mesmerized. Then again, among other things, it’s hard not to be when you have a band baller enough to start their album with a ten-minute self-titled emotional rollercoaster prog epic. To be perfectly honest though, roughly twelve years ago, no one was really making music like this. I would dare say this was the point in time where cinematic metal was truly born.
In a sense I still feel like I’m uncovering layers even so many years later. It’s hard not to be wholly enthralled. The sheer, raw, emotional depth of the record is parallelled by few things in the medium of sound. Much like the ocean waves crashing into the shores, Acid Mist Tomorrow breathes and oozes with a mighty ancient pulse brimming in equal parts with drama and serenity.
In an eerie and uncanny similarity, just as a living creature, it exhibits a valence for a vehement rage, unremitting sadness, arcane wistfulness, philosophical contemplation, esoteric reverie, paradisiac tranquility, and everything in between. This is more than just its cinematic presentation transpiring clearly. It is imbued with the band’s artistic spirit in a way that few ever manage.
I have listened to this record in many different moments in my life and it proved to be an endless well of wonder as well as an aid in a variety of ways. There were times when I needed to grind my teeth out as the monstrous riffs from the title track and “Six Fingers In One Hand She Holds The Dawn”, while clenching my fists, only to make it to “Story of the Eye” fully re-composed. Equally, I’d arrive fully disheartened into the middle of “Story of the Eye”, wondering where the fuck did everything go awry, only to find myself gazing through walls, long after the music ended, feeling relieved, without a hint of sorrow.
Other times I’d listen to the ending of “Six Fingers In One Hand She Holds The Dawn” and/or most of part 3 of “Gehenne” staring out into the night sky, pondering existence, conjuring wild otherworldly imagery which is entirely impossible to quantify in any other way than whatever I felt at the moment. The album is aided by its intentional lyrical vagueness and obscurity into making it mysterious and so much more subjective for listeners. While I would’ve always liked a lyric sheet to sing/scream along to, I do have to admit that I love perpetually reinterpreting lyrics and giving them my own meaning. It’s definitely a double-edged sword.
To be perfectly honest, I could sit here and break down every song into riffs, bits, passages, samples, and such, and talk fervently about each and every one of them in detail, praise them, put all of them on pedestals, line them up under spotlights, then wax poetic about what little lyrics I deciphered, are about, and so on and so forth, and I’d be nowhere near the weight Acid Mist Tomorrow bears with me and within me. This is not just ‘another album’ made by ‘some people from France’. It’s an artifact, with which I aged together, grew wiser and better, and by my side it was an adventure and a companion as much as an emotional crutch and a source of entertainment.
Some people might even call me crazy for illustrating such a deep sense of kinship with/for something that’s even more insubstantial than a physical object, and that’s fine. But what I think is truly crazy, is the possibility of not being able to commune with any artistic medium at this level, or another individual for that matter, at a level at which you’d call someone crazy for doing it. I couldn’t imagine life without such communion and in turn it is rather hard to imagine how today would’ve been like in the absence of Acid Mist Tomorrow.
