AKHIL SOOD

A spate of post-something (rock/metal/blah/blah) artists sprouting up every damn where in the world has resulted in the possibility of a surplus of supply. Then again, the fluid melodic core of the sound itself means that demand very often supersedes supply, which obviously means the emergence of even more artists. It’s an endless ouroboros chain that’s eventually going to lead to mutually assured destruction. But until then, we should enjoy the wave (while we still can). So Cloudkicker is another in a long line of self-produced musicians putting out a decent quality of music around, and he’s managed to become quite the independent internet sensation, churning out his third full-length, Fade, which this review happens to be about.

Fade is a worthy listen which, while filled with several moments of ecstatic peace, also comes with its fair share of middling passages of almost extraneous bits and pieces. The album peaks with its second track, the mammoth mother of a song called ‘Seattle’, clocking in at over 10 minutes, coming with around like 10,000 crests and troughs, and reaching a pinnacle of unprecedented highs that are dreamy, visceral, fragile, strapping, and very surreal all at the exact same time. The rest of the album, though, falls short of the aforementioned apex of Fade, trying in vain to reach that same complex emotional milieu. That’s not to say that it’s poor music or anything – anything but, actually; it’s still reflective and deep, but the largesse and the generosity of space that post-rock music usually affords its musical landscapes is not quite in abundance here. The songs never quite reach their rightful conclusion.

But then, all that theoretical and fatalistic mumbo-jumbo is adequately taken care of by the fact that the quality of composition is top notch. Ben Sharp (aka Cloudkicker) has a gift for creating from scratch conventionally accessible melodies which he then fits into oddly-shaped packages of sound that we’ve come to call ‘structure’. So each song is a snug fit in and of itself, and while the album doesn’t quite reach the enormity that it probably aims at, individually the songs serve as a bunch of all-embracing personalized entities that require careful thought and deliberation. And of course, there’s ‘Seattle’. 

Download the album for free at cloudkicker.bandcamp.com