Deadspace - The Liquid Sky

Just a month or so ago I applauded Deadspace for their work on their side of a split album with Happy Days called Reaching for Silence. The songs they penned showed a distinct Ghost Bath influence (as well as influences from a few other bands involved with ambient black metal) but Deadspace channeled a more condensed and dynamic brand of black metal than Ghost Bath did this year. And a much more solid songwriting output set Deadspace apart from (and in my opinion, above) their influential and notorious predecessor.

Finishing off their year with the full-length follow-up to Reaching for Silence, Deadspace came into The Liquid Sky with both a healthy momentum and a high bar set for themselves to leap over.

The Liquid Sky sets itself apart from Reaching for Silence in a few subtle ways, and a few of them make the albums hard/unfair to judge side by side (not that they have to make it easy for me). For one, the band had at their disposal a small arsenal of guest vocalists, of whom they made excellent use of their fullest potential on Reaching for Silence. The vocal diversity and stylistic uniqueness in the context of shoegaze-y black metal across the band’s five songs from that album was a particular highlight for me, and something I hadn’t heard done quite like Deadspace had managed to do. The Liquid Sky, on the other hand, is a more largely unassisted effort by the band from what I can tell, and it forces them to flex their composition and performance muscles all the way through a little more strenuously.

The album as a whole, I feel, is a bit less exciting than Reaching for Silence, but naturally so to a great degree. While the previous five songs they released this year each bore their own less cohesive identity that slightly challenged their home genre’s paradigm, the band play much more directly to the world of atmospheric black metal this time, not making many monstrous alterations to its established blueprints. This just leads to The Liquid Sky being less unpredictable from movement to movement than the split album before it, but The Liquid Skystill has plenty to offer. “The Worms Must Feed” contains possibly one of the most euphoric blast-beat driven and cathartic guitar-directed bridges I’ve heard this year. While not as sprawling in stylistic capacity, the vocals all throughout are still diverse and more often than not, performed with incredibly tangible passion (especially the growls on the closing track). While on the subject of vocals, “Kidney Bleach” was a song whose vocal melodies and style took some time to grow on me, but it’s a decent moody breather after the brightly blazing black metal windstorm before it and I especially love the strangely smooth transition from the female clean vocals into the more harshly sung (male? or still the same female?) vocals in the second half of the song.

To cite a weak spot, I think the album starts off on a less than attention-grabbing foot with “The Aching…” and the standard atmospheric, Ghost Bath-esque track it leads into, “Void”, which just seems more adherent to the expected structures of such types of ambient black metal songs, and I think I was hoping for the band to make a bigger statement with the opening of the album. The band do redeem themselves quickly though with the incredibly nasty and sinister guitar opening of “Below the Human Scumline”, truly kick-starting the album three tracks in. The weirdly short “Reflux” goes about the Ghost Bath style a little more competently than “Void” (and more competently than Ghost Bath themselves for the most part), but it’s another song I felt was less ambitious and fulfilling than what Deadspace have shown themselves to be capable of on previous songs and other songs on this album.

While I don’t think The Liquid Sky reached quite the same heights as Reaching for Silence, I would say it is an improvement on their effort from last year and certainly more worthwhile than the dragging Ghost Bath LP and the awkward return to form Wolves in the Throne Room tried this year. I think on this album, the band exercised themselves more than adequately in the department of loud/soft atmospheric black metal dynamics, perhaps to the point of some slight soreness by the time the epic “Comatose” rolls around. What the band showed they can do with fine execution, and what I would love to see them build on in the future, is the dynamic of moods they cultivate across the highlight tracks on this album, “The Worms Must Feed” and “Below the Human Scumline” particularly. I’d love to see them play with the flow of somber ambiance, uplifting post-metal, ambiguously brooding ambiance, and maybe even some relentlessly explosive and hellish suicidal black metal.

Until then, congratulations on another job well done to Deadspace. Again, they are on Bandcamp and they are well worth the time to check out.