A year and a half on from their convincing debut, Pillar of Light are back with an album.
Signed to Transcending Obscurity Records, the American band featuring Aaron Whitfield (vocals/keyboards), Alex Kennedy (guitar/keyboards, Jesus Wept), Scott Christie (guitar), James Obenour (bass) and Eric Scobie (drums) unveil Caldera, their first studio album.
The adventure begins in melancholy with Wolf To Man, but you feel more and more oppressed when the vocal parts appear, and the sensation redoubles when the riffs invite themselves into the mix. The progression through the block of darkness is quite natural, incorporating touches of Post Metal and Shoegaze to create steamy elements, such as the final guitar that carries us through to Leaving, where the haunting sound picks up again and in turn locks us in under its gloomy veil. The composition tends to calm down, leaving the vocalist alone with a few soaring harmonics, but the saturation takes possession of the rhythm before suddenly bursting into flame and disappearing, giving way to Spared, which grants us thirty seconds of calm. The sound explodes without warning, then runs out of steam again to punctuate its apathy with heady blasts that trample us mercilessly until the final apocalypse, followed by Eden, a soothing three-minute interlude in clear sound. Any notion of quietude disappears with the dissonant Infernal Gaze, where the notion of progression and changing rhythms is once again exploited, particularly with the arrival of the central blast followed by the blossoming leads before moving on to Unseeing, which hypnotizes us for a brief moment. Aggression returns in waves, creating an irregular flow of intense heaviness that lulls us with brutality before releasing us on Certain End, the album’s final composition, where we discover airy melodies that contrast with the power of the riffs, making the mix as coherent as it is improbable, but above all incredibly intense from start to finish, despite the saving break.
Although Caldera is only a debut album, it’s fair to say that Pillar of Light already have found a strong musical identity. The band expresses itself with slowness, dissonance and crushing sonorities to create long but gripping tracks that do justice to their heavy musical heritage.
90/100
