review: VACANT EYES: A Somber Preclusion of Being

Vacant Eyes

A Somber Preclusion of Being

September 4th, 2020

In the case of a band that is new to the listener a main question on the mind is: What is it that this band does that is interesting to me? There are so many genres and new bands doing all sorts of crazy loud stuff. People want something that entertains in some way. Vacant Eyes is a bit more conservative in that sense; they’re not trying to invent a new genre, and they’re not crazy experimentalism nor weird genre mixtures. What Vacant Eyes does is something that has proven to work: melodies. More to the point, it is beautiful-somber melodies and an unusually tremendous abundance of them, so much so that, if we must point to the one thing that they do as their defining characteristic, the sheer quantity of melodies and the quality of them is what Vacant Eyes is all about.

First, what it is not: It is not happy-go-lucky heavy/power nor fast thrash/death/black melodies. It is not sugary metalcore/melodeath melodies. It is not a metal version of pop melodies. It is not any of that. The melodies evoke both a sense of aristocratic elegance and beauty, along the lines of melancholy, or sublime awe, or Romanticism, or emotions away from the happy/angry tropes often used in metal music. Emotions that reach for a sense of beauty, like a great classic painting, sculpture or epic poem.

There are two major considerations with Vacant Eyes: 1. The album is almost 75 minutes. 2. This is death doom, a genre notorious for slow-motion songwriting. Both of these are usually major concerns because who has the patience for 75 minutes of slow-motion monotony?! In blunt words, death doom, unless you are already a devoted fan, can be truly boring. Boring music for 35 minutes is one thing, and boring music for 75 minutes is just unacceptable, except for those fans that develop a taste for it.

Vacant Eyes is keenly aware that monotonous slow motion gets boring and that if you dare to make an album almost 75 minutes, you best bring your A game if you hope to entertain people other than the die-hard fans of sloth metal. For this reason, even though this is death doom, the music features a nice variety (it’s not crazy tempo changes) within songs and this avoids formulaic songwriting. Most importantly, their use of melodies is constant throughout the songs. Unlike other bands, they do not make you wait ten minutes of drone/sludge sloth-lazy riff repetition until you finally, at last, receive the melody. This band is going to give the melodies to you right away, keep giving them for the duration of the song, and the fact that the songs and album are so long are not even going to matter. This band knows! It’s like they know the problems that are inherent to doom. Vacant Eyes works with somber-beautiful melodies in a way that seeks to impress upon the listener a sense of grace that won’t soon be forgotten. They have gone all out and made an album like it is the last thing that they will ever do in this lifetime (don’t expect a follow-up album any time soon!).

Let’s talk about the negative aspects of the album. The drums seem to be too clean to sound like real, live drums in the studio. There is not a whole lot of noise of cymbals, for instance, the way that real cymbals tend to be a bit noisy in metal. The snare sounds, again, almost too perfect, too clean. This publication cannot state it as a fact that this is the sound of sampled drumming or real, live studio drums, but the sound may be a bit too clean to be real, live human drumming in the studio.

This album was probably a bad business decision by the band. The band could have easily released two separate albums in two separate years and keep the promoting going on for a good two years straight, or even do three separate EPs and keep the promoting and keep the band in the metal press for three years and just basically stay public with merch (various separate shirt designs for three EPs, etc.), lyric videos, playthrough videos, so on and so forth. However, they decided to give the fans the entire work all in one big gigantic moment. The band has missed out on a business opportunity to milk and rip off the fans for money time and again for three years straight. Well, that’s fine, we suppose, but they won’t become billionaires thinking this way, will they?! Maybe they have not paid enough attention to the way that Coca-Cola, Google, Kiss or Iron Maiden find ways to keep the customers paying.

To conclude, even the vocals offer a type of elegant growl that is not annoying, that is mixed at the right volume and done in a skilled way so as not to become a distraction. Anyway, if you are interested in grandiose doom, and you are willing to explore a band that plays slow music but in a measured way with some nice tempo changes, then the melodies are going to be something special.

A Somber Preclusion of Being by Vacant Eyes