I've got a little down time this afternoon so I'm gonna take this opportunity
to yap about the album I've been into lately, Blue Garden by Delta Sleep.
Delta sleep is a math rock band from the UK, and though they've been around for some time
now, they're new to me! I have a proclivity for songs that sound like a wall of sound. I like
dense compositions with a lot of layers to explore. Typically that leads me to a lot of different
metal genres, but combine that with my pop punk intrests in high school and college and math rock
seems a pretty natural crossing of those paths.
The first Delta sleep song I heard was "Sofa Boy",
which came to me from my discover weekly on Spotify a couple years ago. Sofa boy to me seems a huge
departure from much of their other music because of its huge presence, and grinding pace. This song
totally hooked me on the first listen because it falls right in to my "wall of sound" category. I was very
surprised to find out how much more up-beat and traditionally math-y the rest of their sound is! Up until
Blue Garden's release it was only Sofa Boy and a couple other singles that I listened to, but this album
is a gem and totally stole me.
I love it when an artist puts a lot of love into setting the stage for an album, and this one opens up
with "Dawn", a very gentle and rich prologue. Dawn has a very smooth transition into my favorite song of
the album, "Slow Burn", which sets itself apart from the rest of the songs with a really strong doom metal
note throughout it. I think every song in this album belongs in it, and the entire listen feels like a story.
The journey in this one is just as important as the destination too, since "Sunchaser", the swan song of this
album, also absolutely rips. Albums like this are what is pushing me to hop off of services like Spotify and
pay artists directly for their music to put on a digital audio player. I am no music critic and i lack a lot
of the vocabulary to accurately describe what makes this album work for me, but there is just some itch it scratches, some
vibration I catch that really gets me. There are magically playful moments, and humbling serious moments, and the skill and fidelity
of the musicians continuously surprises me. If you're feeling experimental or bored of typical alt rock, or even
someone who doesn't usually find themselves in the math rock neck of the woods, I'd highly reccomend giving this one
a shot!