Spirit Adrift - Divided by Darkness

Goddamnit, this month really needs to cool it with all the stellar and addictive album releases; it’s fucking up my rhythm. How am I supposed to get immersed in all these albums when they all make me just want to indulge in them uninhibitedly? Why can’t some more of them just suck so that I don’t have to want to ever go back to them after giving them their fair chance? Woe is me!

Today’s culprit in this recent string of frustratingly awesome albums is the Spirit Adrift, a relatively young quartet from the sweaty natural sauna of Phoenix, Arizona whose sophomore album in 2017 I missed because I had homework to do. But I sure as hell am going to be checking out that album and their debut after hearing this thing because, again, goddamn! I know this is probably a very rambly and unprofessional intro that’s giving away my main feeling on the album right at the start, but I’m not professional, so let my stream of musically infatuated consciousness be.

Where was I? Spirit Adrift. I’d never heard of this band until I saw Inter Arma talking mad shit and challenging them over Twitter to a test of physical strengths in the form of an anything-goes street brawl (in friendly jest, obviously), but being a fan of Inter Arma and especially admiring their new album this year, I figured I’d give their friends’ new album a listen too, and holy shit! I might start backing off on the conversational swearing and shit (stuff), just because I didn’t quite lose my composure so readily with other albums from this year that I definitely admire on a similar level as this one here, but for one last exclamation, gosh-dang-flippin’-butt-fucking wow is this a good album! Immediately upon my first listen, from the opening guitar leads and soaring clean vocal melodies of the introductory track, “We Will Not Die”, I was reminded for the first time this year of my favorite album of last year (which I have since referred to as perfect in my eyes), Khemmis’ Desolation. The classic heavy metal approach to the soulful, melodic, and beautifully harmonized guitar leads instantly brought me back to my number one album of 2018, and the generally more uptempo and less melancholic take on slightly sludgy doom metal as well reminded me even further, and in a good way.Spirit Adrift is certainly not biting Khemmis’ style; I’d say Khemmis do a bit better to conjure a sense of victoriousness within their sorrow that makes their brand of semi-doom a little more emotionally well-rounded that what is on Divided by Darkness.

And this is not to say that Spirit Adrift don’t drum up a strong emotive reaction; theirs is just a little more straightforward and less layered than Khemmis’. But I mean, listen to “We Will Not Die” and tell me that guitar work and clean vocal melodic structures are not Khemmis as fuck. To make one more comparison to an intra-genre contemporary of theirs, I’d say Spirit Adrift on this album reach for and achieve a rather similar feeling of emotional openness through uncharacteristically brightly melodic tendencies for doom to what Pallbearer did on their 2017 album, Heartless.

I already mentioned the infectious NWOBHM guitar harmonies and inspiring vocals on the opening track, but the thrill certainly do not end there; the title track applies the same melodic riffing and slightly gruff vocal melodies to a slower, crunchier classic doom composition, with a few spacier curveball sections and a soulful closing guitar solo to spice it up for good measure. And the subsequently more stern-faced battle march of “Born into Fire” offers a similarly dynamic blend of soaring vocal catharsis and pounding groove over a strong (and at times intimidating) chuggy andante doom riffage.

The band get a little extra emotive and noticeably Pallbearer-ish when they get to the somber “Angel and Abyss” though, whose burst into heart-wrenching guitar melodies from its soft, clean guitar intro reminds me so much of Pallbearer’s “A Plea for Understanding”. The soloing near the track’s end definitely strikes me as being even more Maiden-influenced than the rest of the album’s solos. For my tastes, such similarities as theses are definitely a positive attributes, and for me, the song is one of the highlights on the album. But there aren’t really any duds anywhere on the album, which each song having its own distinct feel and spin on the band’s sound on this album. I keep bringing up the guitars and vocals, but love how the highly emotive classic heavy metal melodies of both on the seething doom dirge of “Tortured by Time” elevate the track from what would otherwise be a very average downcast doom song. The increased pace and fantasy-laced energy of the subsequent “Hear Her” is great too, and I love the swagger that the groove-metal-esque guitar rhythms bring to the track that open the space up for the lead to solo more quickly and with a different type of expressiveness compared to the rest of the album’s songs. The slight alternative metal melodic stylings and clean guitar interlude sections of the following track, “Living Light”, also combine to make quite an uplifting song for the concentration of doom elements present across it, which does a lot for the emotional dynamic of the album’s flow after the ups and downs of the moods of the three tracks that precede it.

The closing instrumental track, “The Way of Return”, takes on a bit more of a fantastical feel across its woodsy mix of acoustic sections and shimmering synth-supplemented melodic guitar-led sections. It’s a good offering of the guitar melodies that really help make the rest of the album, mixed in more freely with some novel flair that didn’t show up previously; it does feel like it’s not as conclusive of a finish to the album as a more dramatic, explosive epic could have been. I think this song might have fit a little more nicely in the middle as a breather, but it’s not the worst sequencing choice ever, and it is still a good tune.

If there’s one thing to potentially to point to in terms of a weakness on this album, it’s perhaps the expending of most, if not all of, its novelty within the first half of the track list, but the slight dip in form the second half takes is hardly worth overstating as a major issue here as that half on its own is still indeed more solid than the majority of projects I’ve heard this year. If not for the four absolutely stellar tracks the last four had to follow, those last four would not have anything to contextualize them as any kind of fatigue or draining of creative ideas. Both halves together certainly make for one of the most expressive and emotionally enveloping albums of the year for sure through their dynamic compositions and abundance of soulful harmonized guitar leads and vocal melodies. Great job, Spirit Adrift. Time for me to check out and potentially get addicted to those first two albums too.

life doom/10