For this beginning of the year, Stellar Death offers us a first album.
Created in late 2019 in the USA by Matt Kozar (guitar/keyboards, Brave, Witnesses) et Scott Loose (guitar/keyboards/drums, While Heaven Wept, Brave), the band called this record Fragments of Light.
Exploring Post-Metal borders, Sludge tones and Progressive accents, the band slowly unveils eight tracks that follow the same directive line, but which offers different landscapes. Whether the guitars’ dissonant softness is very present, a snoring bass joins regular hits to create a heavy basis. A dark quietness peacefully strengthens, then thicker riffs strike, with still this seizing dimension, this languor and this melancholy. We obviously find some effects on leads, like the ghostly sound of Approaching The Singularity, the intense saturation of The Astronomer or the dormant strength of Everywhere And Nowhere. Riffs are sometimes cold, sometimes more catchy, but while staying distant and borrow to space’s immensity to wonder us, scare us, tickle our curiosity, smash us, but above all captivate us. The full-length comes to its end with the long and ambient Critical Mass (That Which Cannot Be Created), which develops an impressive array of sonorities to softly lead us in this wide universe until the climax of the band’s creativity, then Afterglow quietly closes this musical chapter thanks to mesmerizing keyboards.
The musical journey offered by Stellar Death is wide, but the obvious relationship of Fragments of Light with cosmos makes us consider the sound in another way, and we like to be mentally lost into those riffs.
80/100