SUPERBLOOM comes in the wake of Silent Planet’s severe van crash last year, which partially inspired its concept: a teenager who encounters the extraterrestrial and disappears.
I must confess, I’ve not kept up with their discography since Everything Was Sound, not due to the quality of the music, but simply because my musical interests veered in different directions than metalcore. However, I’ve always been a fan of their lyrics, and especially enjoy their footnotes. When I read that SUPERBLOOM was partially inspired by their near-death accident, I felt obliged to give it a listen and see how they’ve changed.
The only songs I’ve heard from their newer sound thus far was “Panopticon”, and it seems they’re similarly continuing in a more synth-driven and groove laden direction. SUPERBLOOM is rife with side-chained synth pads and roaring vocal performances.
I almost even dare to say it’s like Baths’s Ocean Death mixed with Meshuggah’s Koloss. Koloss, unlike other prominent albums like Obzen or Chaosphere, focuses less on complexity, but trance-like rhythms that repeat and slither in and out of conventional rhythm using more orthodox time signatures. Ocean Death has that sort of sidechained and dark trance-like atmospheric synths that Silent Planet seem to utitlize heavily all over this record.
“Lights off the Lost Coast” and “Offworlder” set SUPERBLOOM off to an amazing start – a tense build up to a moderate groove. Alex Camerena really shines in this album and the mix (by the incredible Buster Odeholm of Humanity’s Last Breath) lets him, most likely due to production by Daniel Braunstein of ex-Volumes fame, as well as production work for other bands like Spiritbox. The ghost notes aren’t up at the forefront, but they really bring an extra rhythmic tang to the songs. In an interview with Kerrang, frontman Garrett Russell states, ‘I could see someone critiquing the record saying that, sonically, it’s all over the place…‘
I actually disagree – there’s enough variety in each song to separate it from each other, but for the most part, all the songs flow well together and have some sort of cohesion. Songs like “Euphoria”, “Collider”, and “The Overgrowth” tend toward a more melodic-focused route while others like “Offworlder” and “Nexus” lean more groovy and rhythmic-focused, and “Antimatter” and “Dreamwalker” straddle both sides. It’s, overall, a very well thought out and balanced record.
There are two gripes about the record – one minor, and one a little bit major. First the minor gripe: “Antimatter”, from 1:14 to 1:42, has the same sort of consistent kick hit – it does feel a little disjointed and out of place. The build up to that chorus could benefit from a bit more of a restraint from the kick, but it doesn’t take too much from the song. It did stand out enough to make an impression on me, but again, incredibly minor. The major gripe is with the eponymous track – it’s VASTLY different from all the preceding tracks. This is where ‘sonically… all over the place,’ could apply, but being sonically all over the place necessarily isn’t a formula bound for failure.
Take concept records like Between the Buried and Me’s Parallax I and II and Slice the Cake’s Odyssey to the West (and both bands unfortunately have had egregious scandals this past year and I do not condone the actions of Dusty Waring or Gareth Mason (formerly Gaia) by referencing these bands) – both are sonically exploratory and experimental, and it all fits. What makes SUPERBLOOM different?
The difference is established patterns in a particular work. Parallax II has a lot of different sounds, from surf rock in “Bloom”, to Carnatic phrases in “Extremophile Elite”, to drumline in “Telos”. Odyssey has ballads/ballad-esque songs in “Castle in the Sky” and “Destiny’s Fool”, cabaret and carnival music in “The Dark Carnival” , and just straight up death metal and deathcore throughout. Right from the start, both Parallax and Odyssey have already established a pattern of a wide variety of sounds, and so it’s not jarring to hear something wildly different, it’s exciting – it feels intentional and integral to the work.
This is not the case with “SUPERBLOOM” – while the previous tracks were dark, heavy, dreary, tinged with industrialism and atmospheric synth lines, “SUPERBLOOM” pops up with this incredibly dreamy shoegaze-esque intro and into more of a metalcore-influenced post-rock tune.
“SUPERBLOOM” by itself is a GREAT track, don’t get me wrong – it sounds like something new Hundredth would write (which I love). But in the context of the album as a whole, it feels almost tossed in there suddenly – there doesn’t seem to be a point to how jarring it feels, as the established pattern of this album isn’t so much sonic variety, but a singular atmosphere (dark, heavy, dreary, as I’ve said before).
Despite this – SUPERBLOOM is Silent Planet taking strides in a new direction, and doing it incredibly well. While The Night that God Slept and Everything Was Sound were pretty riff heavy (with their penchant for atmosphere still very present), SUPERBLOOM is just raw groove and rhythm. It’s not groundbreaking or innovative by any means, but that’s not a bad thing – it’s an incredibly catchy and listenable album that fans of their sound on Iridescent or When the End Began will cherish.