![]() These issues that I raise don’t kill the record, they merely prevent me from loving it. Despite that feeling, I had a good time with the record. I just left the listening experience feeling a vague sense of deja vu and wondering what Sisyphean was missing. To be clear, Colours Of Faith wasn’t a bad album. At other times, when the vamp is active or when Sisyphean attempt to create a spooky moment, there just isn’t enough going on to be worth paying attention to. ![]() I can forgive this when the melodies are clicking because that is enough to satisfy the need for movement. Colours Of Faith stagnates because it relies on atmosphere and crunched melodies rather than progressing the music. Within the context of the record, clashing harmonies is simply a musical baseline. This sums up my issue with Sisyphean’s use of dissonance: it doesn’t resolve. ![]() But within this style, Sisyphean simply creates moment of tension after moment of tension, rather than going through and resolving them. Sometimes the band overuses tremolo because they didn’t know how else to find space, sometimes they use repetition to create an interesting pulse. Sometimes the song structure takes the listener to interesting places, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes Sisyphean use dissonance as a crutch to avoid writing interesting passages, sometimes they don’t. Outside of that, Colours Of Faith ends up a little too close to mediocre. Every musician plays their part well and all justify the added clarity that the production gives them. A healthy portion of Colours Of Faith’s runtime contains blast beats, but the drummer switches things up enough that I appreciate the ability to focus on every instrument. Instead you can differentiate most notes, and this allows Sisyphean to make full use of their style. The band’s twin focuses on atmosphere and dissonance could have resulted in a record caked in mud and indecipherable moments. ![]() The production aids Sisyphean’s style as previously mentioned. It would have been better to have more of this type of songwriting. Sisyphean provide a good contrast to this in the introduction to the final track “Conqueror,” which uses repetitive passages to slowly build into a nice, full metal song. These moments only serve to bloat the runtime of the record. See 4:10 in “Scorched Timeless” for the first example. From the start, there are passages where Sisyphean just let the general black metal aura vamp for a while and don’t do anything to progress the music. And with them disappear my appreciation for this record. Inevitably, those melodic lines disappear. When those melodic lines lock in, Colours Of Faith creates joy. Some of this can be credited to an excellent production job, but some to a songwriting approach that manages to incorporate plenty of crunchy moments while maintaining clear melodic lines. Colours Of Faith contains close-together lines, but within the context of their subgenre their songs sound pleasant and soothing. Whether or not Sisyphean play sufficiently dissonant black metal to you will depend on how much Serpent Column and Imperial Triumphant you’ve consumed. For Fans Of: Blut Aus Nord, Serpent Column, Skapheĭissonance requires context.
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