[Click play above to stream Blue Heron’s Everything Fades in full. The album is out Sept. 27 on Blues Funeral Recordings. The band play Ripplefest Texas on Sept. 20.]

The second full-length from Albuquerque’s Blue Heron begins, of course, with a science lecture. Okay not quite. Lead cut “Null Geodesic” unfolds with a snippet about or responding to or by theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, and before it evaporates into echoing trails a few seconds later, it reminds the listener that science is based on observation. Fair enough. One might observe a similarity in concept behind the title of Everything Fades — the four-piece’s second album — and their first, 2022’s Ephemeral (review here). Accordingly, since when in side A’s “Swansong” frontman Jadd Shickler declares, “I’m running out of legends and I’m sick of saying goodbye,” the hardest thing to know is which legend he’s talking about (I’d guess Mark Lanegan, but feel free to make your own pick), it feels safe on a scientific level to note the continued relevance of the theme.

Joined in the band by guitarist Mike Chavez, bassist Steve Schmidlapp and drummer Ricardo Sanchez, Shickler is a significant presence in the material as he is in the broader heavy underground. Like Chavez, he formerly featured in Spiritu, and in addition to founding Blues Funeral Recordings and serving as label boss for Magnetic Eye Records, he’s one of the two founders of the defunct imprint MeteorCity, and arguably somebody who has been part of shaping heavy rock as it is today on a level few others could claim as their own.

He’s not writing songs about it, so it’s not all directly relevant to Everything Fades, but he’s someone I’ve known for 20 years, give or take, and one can hear in the included nine-tracks/38-minutes a conversation happening with the modern sphere — you’ll recall the band took part in Ripple Music‘s split series with last year’s Turned to Stone Ch. 8 (review here), sharing a platter with now-on-Magnetic–Eye Texas rockers High Desert Queen; the coursing, grunge-nodding progression of “Clearmountain” on Everything Fades would seem to show some effect of that — as Blue Heron build on the accomplishments of their debut.

And Everything Fades very much does that. “Null Geodesic” serves double-duty as a proper opener and an album-intro, and its sub-three-minute run recalls the interludes from the prior long-player but is more of a song despite a simpler structure where the heavy middle establishes the desert-hued tonal heft to come, brings the first gritty vocal echoes and balances impact and atmosphere. Much of Everything Fades feels tighter-wrought than Ephemeral, and part of that may just be that “Null Geodesic” is backed by the four-and-a-half-minute title-track instead of a 13-minute jam-out, but there’s no lack of expanse carried in the sound either way.

Tonally rich, Chavez‘s guitar and Schmidlapp‘s bass intertwine fluidly over the emphatic march of Sanchez‘s drumming as “Everything Fades” moves toward its pedal-click volume burst, and Shickler‘s guttural take recalls some of Neil Fallon‘s throatier moments but proves malleable in the more melodically-focused “Swansong,” which includes backing harmonies, and side B’s aforementioned “Clearmountain” as well as the penultimate “Bellwether,” which ties it all together with a particularly heavy push near the finish, ready to give over to 1:17 instrumental capper/outro “Flight of the Heron.”

This evolved approach corresponds with an instrumentalist breadth that manifests a crushing lumber on centerpiece “Dinosaur” at the start of side B, an immersive roll through “Swansong” and others, and a bluesy psychedelic turn in the sans-vocal “Trepidation,” which scorches in spacious lead guitar over Sanchez‘s steady thud until it fades out. As a whole, then, Blue Heron present a more dynamic take across Everything Fades, and do not draw needlessly stark lines between elements in their blend of microgenres. When “Flight of the Heron” kicks in with a riff that feels as purely Kyussian as desert rock could to be — Sanchez‘s soon-arriving drums give a more urgent edge to that — that point of arrival is earned all the more by the swath of ground the band have covered in getting there.

Be it in the tense thud and crawl of the first half of “We Breathe Darkness” that resolves in a consuming, fluid sprawl of distortion, or in the stomp of “Dinosaur,” which revels in its stomp and is one several showpieces for Sanchez besides, or Shickler‘s higher-register reach in the apex of “Bellwether,” Blue Heron find ways to underscore their development as a band over the last several years, without either making Everything Fades about that more than its own songs or letting the material stray too far from where they want it to go. This self-awareness is a strength in terms of their craft and aesthetic purposes, and the album is able to cast itself as a front-to-back journey in part because of it. There may be a lot going on at any given point, and variety is given to structure as well as volume throughout — and not just with what’s a ‘song’ and what’s an interlude — but Everything Fades is cohesive and directed, and boasts a depth of mix that affects the listening experience, whether they’re going all-out and not.

Spiritu never got to put out a follow-up to their 2002 self-titled, and some of what Blue Heron do is directly inherited from Chavez and Shickler‘s work in that outfit, but not all of it. Certainly a powerhouse rhythm section, modern production, and greater stylistic range make a difference, and these are aspects of Blue Heron that come to light throughout Everything Fades in relation to its own predecessor. As the band dig further into their songwriting modus, they seem to find more that works, and even if the pieces included are shorter on average, they’re allowed more impact for that individually while feeding into the overarching flow that, like the movement in “Bellwether” from mellow, tom-backed sandy brooding into a vibrant, hard-hitting course, comes across as organic. At no point does Everything Fades feel forced to go somewhere it doesn’t want to, and much to Blue Heron‘s credit, “Flight of the Heron” resists the temptation to undo its impact with cleverness and ends cold.

To bottom line it, while Ephemeral saw Blue Heron setting forth with an idea of who they were and the kind of music they wanted to make, Everything Fades magnifies that exponentially and is therefore an greater showing of potential for continued growth. Without pretense, they align to an expanded definition of what desert rock is, and in fostering a more varied persona across these songs, they sound ready to add to it. Speaking scientifically, the record kicks ass.

Blue Heron, “Dinosaur” official video

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Tags: Albuquerque, Blue Heron, Blue Heron Everything Fades, Blues Funeral Recordings, Everything Fades, New Mexico

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