Night Verses – “Every Sound Has A Color In The Valley Of Night: Part 2”

Night Verses smash the back half of their first double album out of the park with a more calculated, thoughtful Part 2 to complement Part 1′s more raucous, catchy side

Release date: March 15, 2024 | Equal Vision Records | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Stream/Purchase

Night Verses have been instrumental (ha) in keeping my love for progressive, multifaceted metal like this alive. Like, they may as well be solo carrying it for me as they’re one of the few bands I go back to with any sort of regularity. Their last album, Every Sound Has A Color In The Valley Of Night: Part 1, was reviewed by my pal Thomas to great effect with me agreeing with just about everything he said about it, including the inclusion of his patented Animals-Circles scale of instrumental metal (you did patent this, right, Thomas?). Graciously, he wanted someone else to give their thoughts on Part 2 – I was happy to oblige.

As Thomas demonstrated through use of the Animals-Circles scale, Night Verses are a band that fall right in the middle between supreme, virtuosic technicality and riveting, heavily textured atmosphere. You can always expect to hear something challenging, fast, and complicated, usually from astute drummer Aric Improta – goddamn, what a player – but also something airy, spacy, perhaps even a little psychedelic. They aren’t mutually exclusive either. Though the band loves playing with pacing and creating cinematic movements for some songs, they mesh together extraordinarily well like on “Plague Dancer” which is mostly a heavy affair, but it scales back in the midsection to let cleaner guitars and cymbal-centric percussion prevail. I love the descending melodies on the guitars that give a sense of being in a bioluminescent cave with glittering rocks and glowing blue waters, but just as these gentler moments come, they go to welcome back brolic bass, tremendous drum fills, and more eccentric guitar work.

It opens up Part 2 well, just as “8 Gates Of Pleasure” does for Part 1, but the real juicy stuff is in the middle. This includes collabs with people I would not have guessed would be on a Night Verses album, nor would I have guessed how good they’d turn out. First up is “Glitching Prisms” which features Incubus‘ singer, Brandon Boyd. Yeah, right? Never been a big Incubus fan, but they had hits, my fave probably being their pop rock ballad “Dig“, and honestly Boyd shines on this track in a similar way. You don’t get the sense that Night Verses had to neuter themselves to make room for Boyd, neither does Boyd have to overstretch to accommodate the band’s idiosyncrasies. It’s simply a masterful melding of a great singer with Night Verses‘ more reserved side which is fine by me. On the hook, Boyd also sounds a bit like how The Black Queen did when they came out with Greg Puciato doing serene cleans.

One thing I did notice about Part 2 and likely you will too is how it’s not as focused on the catchiness of the melodies. To me, there’s no song on here like “Karma Wheel”, “Arrival”, or the aforementioned “8 Gates Of Pleasure” which are all very unabashed with their upfront melodies and structures. With two of those being singles, I get it. Part 2 still has astonishing writing, but it’s more along the line of something Joe Satriani would do in his earlier years (this is a big compliment for me as I love Satch’s early shit). You get more atmosphere, more ambiance, and this along with the metrics of power and skill that’s abundant on Part 2, this creates its more thoughtful soul. To make a thinly veiled Ice Cube reference, who also put out a double album in his time, if Part 1 is the War album, then Part 2 is most definitely Peace.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way! When Night Verses announced their new album would be a double album split into two releases, I wondered how they’d pull it off. Sure, I just wanted more of the band, but justifying it in this manner and not having it come off as unnecessary or bloated is hard – not every band is Coheed and Cambria. When listening to songs like “Desire To Feel Nothing” or “Crystal X” and how they build and churn along, mostly with delicate sections connected by warm handshakes rather than action-packed throttling, I see the vision. I hear the vision. I hear songs with well-utilized features like “Glitching Prisms” or “Slow Dose” which has Anthony Green (Circa Survive, Saosin, L.S. Dunes) on it and I actually wonder why and how the hell the band hadn’t done this more before. They’ve proven to have a good knack for picking featured performers that I certainly look forward to what else they can throw together in the future.

As is customary, Night Verses finishes this album with a new iteration of their continuing “Phoenix” series, this one called “Phoenix V: Invocation”, an exceptionally robust and busy closer that loops back over to Part 1‘s opening very well. I just love how all of this feels. I love the variety in sonic textures, how I can reach out and practically touch the crystal-clear and smooth water of the lightly reverbed clean guitars, the felt-like sound profile on the bass, or the crunchy stucco on much of the distorted guitars in the more adrenaline-laced sections. Night Verses are back! They never left, but still – Every Sound Has A Color In The Valley Of Night is another bona fide accomplishment for the band who can, it appears, do no wrong, with Part 2 especially being a well-thought-out and expertly executed part of a whole and standalone piece itself.