Review & Track Premiere: Slumbering Sun, The Ever-Living Fire
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on February 21st, 2023 by JJ Koczan
[Click play above to stream the title-track of The Ever-Living Fire by Slumbering Sun. Album is out Feb. 24 with preorders on Bandcamp here.]
You’ll pardon me if we skip the debate on whether or not Slumbering Sun is a supergroup. Based in Austin, Texas, the five-piece emotive doom outfit brings together vocalist James Clarke of Monte Luna, guitarist Keegan Kjeldsen and drummer Penny Turner from Destroyer of Light, guitarist/vocalist Kelsey Wilson of Temptress and bassist Garth Condit of Monte Luna and Scorpion Child, so one way or the other, they are not wanting for experience in underground heavy. And their self-released debut album, The Ever-Living Fire, is unquestionably the beneficiary of this collective experience. Full in its production, coherent in songwriting, energetic in performance even in its most deliberately slogging and doomed stretches, the five-song/44-minute offering is a generous lesson on how to find an in-genre niche, and how to, as a new band, approach craft with a sense of perspective and purpose.
With Wilson commuting about three hours from Dallas to Austin, they do not come across as haphazard, and the nascent feel in some of the material adds excitement rather than detracting from the atmosphere in the material. They are perhaps an advent of pandemic-era creative reshuffling/redirection, as the lyrics to subdued centerpiece “Love in a Fallen World” seem to speak toward, but whatever brought them together, they are doing more here than “seeing where it goes” or any so casual cliché. The Ever-Living Fire is expressive and weighted in kind, forlorn in the spirit of Pallbearer with a notable and malleable performance from Clarke as frontman, whether he’s riding the riff of 12-minute opener and longest track (immediate points) “Morgenröte” or nodding to Mike Patton and Patrick Walker in “Love in a Fallen World,” Ozzy Osbourne in the penultimate “Dream Snake,” maybe even Howard Jones in the closing “The Ever-Living Fire,” etc., and powerful in terms of the presence of the band behind him, as Wilson steps up to make “Liminal Bridges” more of a duet amid the (relatively) faster push of the groove behind.
From the outset there is no rush. “Morgenröte” begins with a whole-album intro of quiet guitar and voice, organically folkish and building toward the eventual crash in at 2:27 as the first consuming thrust arrives. They’re soon into the verse and underway, but the atmosphere they set up in that intro holds firm despite the volume splurge, lead guitar howling in response to the wistful melody in the chorus vocal lines. Again, Pallbearer are a touchstone for this style and Slumbering Sun share some of their existential-feeling lumber, but that is not necessarily a limit imposed so much as a foundation from which they’re working outward.
The gentle lead notes above the fray in “Liminal Bridges” are drawn more from heavy post-rock, while the chase-chug in the midsection of “Dream Snake” speaks to traditional doom metal as fostered by Candlemass and the emotional peak of “The Ever-Living Fire” answers that with a thoroughly modern subversion, but the key is that from all of these aspects — which aren’t inherently divergent, but still — Slumbering Sun hone a refreshing style of their own and deliver the abiding message of The Ever-Living Fire, which is their own forward potential.
With the band spread out geographically and members involved in other ongoing projects, it’s difficult to say what their priorities may ultimately become, but if they do move ahead with Slumbering Sun as a ‘real band,’ maybe even one that tours, the work they do with these tracks not only gives backbone to that promise, i.e., a cause worthy of such support, but sets out multiple avenues of songcraft they might continue to explore. One does not come out of The Ever-Living Fire with the sense that Slumbering Sun are a settled issue in terms of aesthetic, and that is part of what makes it such an engrossing listen, since even as they issue their first work, they do so with a clear idea of what they want to be as a band.
Such an idea might grow and change with time, and that’s fine — an ideal, actually — but it’s the intent behind what they do here from which it will inevitably develop. It is all the more fortunate, then, that The Ever-Living Fire is as spacious as it is, as patient as it is regardless of tempo, as dynamic as even “Dream Snake” as a standalone shows them to be, with its metallic soloing leading to a slow and grand finish, inclusive either of strings or keyboard sounds comfortably set alongside the heavy nod of the bass and drums. The album’s fluidity is among its greatest strengths, and right unto the “nah-nah-nah” pre-crescendo of the title-track, that is born out of the melody, which is thoughtful throughout and draws the material together even while presenting shifts of its own from song to song.
Thus changes like that at around 7:30 in “Morgenröte” — and about a minute later as it bump-bumps into a quieter, bass-led stretch and dares to showcase Clarke and Wilson with a confidence that makes them that much more able to pull off doing so — become emblematic of the ethic of the band overall, which is to bask in breadth while offering a human spirit to dwell in it. As the four pieces after the opener work shortest-to-longest, allowing for the multi-stage finale of the title-track, the album reaches farther and farther with that same crucial poise, expansive but never itself removed from its objectives. Moreover, the earnestness manifest in, for example, the return to the hook after the bridge of “Liminal Bridges” or the dramatic ending of “Dream Snake,” bolsters the sense of Slumbering Sun as a project driven by passion and creative urgency; the need behind the thing’s making born through the thing itself.
I will not engage in speculation or hyperbole, despite ready temptation. The Ever-Living Fire is a beginning point and one doubts even the band think of themselves as a finished product, but it immediately sets itself up to stand among 2023’s best debut albums, and it digs in willfully and with palpable knowledge of where it’s coming from and maybe even where it’s headed, impressing with scope while remaining structurally solid. A concept proven, with gusto. Now the real work can begin.
