Album Details

• Artist: Red Sparowes
• Album: At The Soundless Dawn
• Label: Neurot
• Year of Release: 2005
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: kev_stev on 2008-06-17

Media

Song titles hold great significance to post-rock bands: they provide insight to the meaning of the music, giving the listener direction to interpret the song to his/her liking.  Fully aware of this, when I first read the titles to Red Sparowes' At the Soundless Dawn, I became immediately disenchanted with the album.  Its pretentiously bombastic titles, such as, "Mechanical Sounds Cascaded Though the City Walls and Everyone Reveled in Their Ignorance," sound like scraps of my platitudinal teenage writing: wordy, overdramatic nonsense.  But while the titles of Red Sparowes' debut album are excessively wordy, the heatedly impassioned music on Soundless Dawn overcompensates for any blunders in title-writing.

The album's opener, "Alone and Unaware, the Landscape Was Transformed in Front of Our Eyes" unorthodoxly begins Soundless Dawn mid-song, playing what sounds like the midsection of a drum solo and the end of a prolonged period of droning, but escalating, guitar reverberations.  The song quickly shocks with a striking crescendo, as the bass and heavy guitars contrast with an Explosions in the Sky-esque guitar chiming, creating a sensation of the heavier guitar absorbing the meeker sound.  During this, At the Soundless Dawn sounds like it is documenting a war, or perhaps an apocalyptic nightmare, with its gloomy soundscapes and intermittent bursts of sonic rage.  Yet the album is not merely misguided morbidity and violence; Red Sparowes show their innovation on "Buildings Began to Stretch Wide Across The Sky, and the Air Filled With a Reddish Glow," where, amid a violent crescendo, the battering guitars cease and only the bass guitar thumps-sounding like a heartbeat, a brief recognition of the violence surrounding the listener, until the music plunges back into the trenches of screeching metal.

Red Sparowes also foray into the atmospheric/ambient aspects of music, but only for aesthetics-not so much substance.  This quietly adds to the bits of beauty belying the album's outer aggression, but it is within the hostility of Soundless Dawn that Red Sparowes' triumphs are held.

User Reviews and Comments

on 2008-06-19 SolitaryMan Said:

I love this album too. They released at least one other between this and the upcoming release, which was pretty good as well. Great post-rock.
Not Rated

on 2008-06-19 dscanland Said:

I love this album! I've been meaning to review it for quite some time. I've heard rumors of a new Red Sparowes possibly later this year.
Not Rated