For those of us who live in an area where daylight savings is a thing, we are now in the throes of an arbitrary shifting of the hours, ostensibly to give us more daylight? it doesn’t work, and I think we collectively know this is a stupid thing that we do. In the global north, days are waning, and no matter how you hack up our time, darkness is consuming us for the next several months until we, again, make believe that we can alter how much sunlight happens in 24 hours in March. There is a positive aspect to this silly inconvenience, and that is the ability to spend more time with the moon and the stars.
For an anonymous, one man black metal project ISLEPTONTHEMOON keeps a bold claim for his attachment to space in name alone. Unless ‘slept’ is the colloquial definition of ‘didn’t pay attention to,’ but if you are going to confess to the stars about your misfortune, getting off Earth would be a good start, followed by a nice rest. I digress, ISLEPTONTHEMOON is a fantastic project that merges depressive-suicidal black metal with blackgaze and slowcore. Formed in 2016, the project has two full-length albums and an EP under their asteroid belt that get progressively more lush and complex with each new release, exploring deeper textures and improved songwriting with each new release.
Only The Stars Know Of My Misfortune is the project’s first release on Bindrune Recordings, a label that has become a safe harbor for dark and heavy music, often rooted in pastoral themes and atmospheric sounds whose past and present roster include greats such as Panopticon, Falls Of Rauros, Obsequiae, Nechochwen, and Exulansis among others. The album is a big step forward for ISLEPTONTHEMOON and another home run for Bindrune.
Opener, “Safety”, draws you in with gently strummed guitar, piano, and strings with vocals that are reminiscent of Dan Barrett (Have A Nice Life, Giles Corey, Black Wing) until the black metal shrieks descend from the blackness of the cosmos in a beautiful flurry of blast beats, tremolo guitar work, and ascending leads. There is a gorgeous air about this album that really makes me question the self-ascribed DSBM label. There is a lot of emotion and the themes of trauma and depression, and of course the anger of black metal, but there is a sublime ecstasy in the delivery of these tracks, raw emotion expressed through the music and vocals that is as alluring as anything Envy or Mono have ever done.
On “Maybe I Don’t Know It Yet, But Good Things Are Coming Soon” the warm sadness of nostalgia playing with the singer’s brother as a child is a deeply affecting track, the hushed tones of the melodic, sad folk that makes up the majority of the track lure you into an Epsom salt bath for your brain, tugging at your heart with descriptions of playing in leaves and with sticks and rocks. When the heavy part hits, the catharsis is a powerful reaction to the ravages of time and estrangement from childhood’s innocence when brotherhood wasn’t challenged by the myriad ways adulthood can strangle those kinds of relationships.
Heavier tracks like “Dimming Light” and “I Belong To The Void” blend the disparate sounds of black metal vs everything else a little more seamlessly, giving intoxicating emotional depth to black metal. While bands like Alcest, Deafheaven, and others in that vein have been doing this for years, rarely has it been done with the level of gravitas and effectiveness that ISLEPTONTHEMOON is able to do, here. Those blackgaze legacy acts have taken their art to a more performative level, reaching great heights, but feeling a little more clinical in their output. Only The Stars Know Of My Misfortune feels raw in its presentation. One person, hidden in the dark night, baring their emotions with such authenticity that it is impossible not to feel something while listening.
“Keep Hidden” plays us out as we enter the long night of winter with gentle piano and swelling strings, narrating the feeling of keeping true feelings a secret from a loved one. ‘I’ll keep hidden from you/like I know to do/when the sky turns black and we stare at the blood red mood,’ they sing, shrouding their masking in the cold winter night. This song, this whole album, is one to carry with you as we trudge into the black, cold winter and deal with all of the joys and sadness of the holiday season. As much as I try to hold on to my own authenticity, I know that I mask my true self around different people, biting my tongue for the sake of family, co-workers, strangers, etc. While I may never dream on the moon, I can imagine this as the soundtrack to witnessing the relative smallness of our world laying on cold rock, finding comfort in the silence of space as my eyes close and consciousness drifts away, a solitude that welcomes confessions of my closest held feelings.
