I just moved to a new place this weekend. It’s nice – probably the nicest place I’ve ever lived in, despite the bedrooms being considerably smaller than I’m used to. I couldn’t even fit my desk and computer in there, just my bed, dresser, nightstand, and entertainment stand with my TV and Xbox Series S on it. The desk is relegated out into a loft/study area, something my mom charitably (incorrectly) calls a third bedroom, but is it really a downgrade? It’s a good area that I’ve taken to already and it’s nice to trace my eyes just a few inches up from my monitor’s edge and see outside. This window’s gonna do work come the warm spring and summer weather.
With all of this change, I’m filled with feelings of hope, of new opportunities and if not a better, at least a different future. I feel younger and more energized, despite the lower back and knee pains I’m still working through from moving. It was incredibly fitting then that the first new album I listened to in my new place is Touch Heaven by ASkySoBlack, something that captures some nostalgic tones wrapped up in a heavy gaze-based sound that I’ve really loved the last few years. As a huge fan of Alice In Chains, I live for this shit as it feels like a natural evolution for that sound.
Even the cover art is so aesthetically devoted to the ’90s, depicting a kind of tactile collage from an older teen’s bedroom at the time, like playing I Spy in a Daria fan’s space. The stacks of VHS tapes, the small TV that some people were lucky to cloister themselves within, a crooked dresser made of old thick wood, a disheveled bed complete with depleted carton of cigs on top (Smell-O-Vision™ would inform a flanking, baked-in nicotine scent as well). If we didn’t live in this space, we knew someone who did – I can practically see the Nirvana shirt in the closet and boombox out of frame.
Smooth, emotive legato vocals with the occasional screams, dense guitars, and an overall weight that something forlorn is hanging above and pressing down on you helps define Touch Heaven‘s sound. Big-time Deftones and even Glassjaw vibes, but also more of contemporaries like Slow Crush, colour design, or Comatose. Don’t let that give the impression that ASkySoBlack are derivative though – the influences are apparent, yet the line they walk between them is wholly their own.
On Touch Heaven, the weight is profound, perhaps linking itself most with colour design and their last album, Nothing Matters Now. The limbs of the music are supported and fed by the veins of the themes and lyrics, marred by the poison of people and the loss they can bring. Agoraphobic moments are informed by ones lit by burnt bridges and bled by love wilted on the vine, the only true vulnerability shown is effort exerted to get someone’s eyes and affection returned after time away. The depression is justified so to speak, an emotional stewing in one’s own head where things are both exaggerated and downplayed to our detriment. Putting them into words like so by ASkySoBlack fashions a mirror for us to look into – do we see ourselves or a dysphoria-fueled mass? Can we even be honest with ourselves with what we see or do we bask in denial?
For me, I’m empathetic. I’m far gone from my teenage years and early 20s, so grown though not finished by a long shot. Still, I hear the pleadings that are in “It’s a Slow Crash” and wince from knowing how that hopeless amount of love and obsession feels. I feel like I’m floating – like, really, I genuinely felt something physical when I focused – when “Hold Me Holy” is driving through its instrumental passages after singing confessions of a dizzying love for almost two minutes.
By the time the album ends, it aches from being broken open. The ending’s title of “Sore For You” is apt, and the lyrics are some of the most cutting on the album, invoking a higher plane even if the album isn’t so devoted to the things that implies. It’s more of a vibe for sure, and a promise that even those we lose aren’t terribly far from us if we believe – we can always reach out and touch heaven, and everyone’s heaven is different.
In that sense, Touch Heaven itself could mean different things for different people depending on where we are in life and what we’re experiencing. I can say for certain this would hit 22-year-old David much harder than 35-year-old David, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late now. I love the album now because I can look back and reflect on the experiences I had, where I went wrong, what I could have done better, what and who I lost in addition to what I have now that keeps me from dramatically toeing the edge of my own sanity like I did before. Sometimes, change is cool and while you can appreciate what’s in the past, you’re thankful for what you get now and in the future.
Band photo by Mario Dante, band name pun in the lede borrowed from Dominik (thanks, pal)
