Following three well-received EPs, Birmingham’s post-rock crew Solars finally step up to the plate and release their debut album. Titled A Fading Future, the extended running time that an album offers has been put to good use and has allowed this post-rock/post-metal quartet to develop their modus operandi in new and exciting ways and finds them serving up seven evocative soundscapes and should garner the group some well-deserved plaudits.
Setting a spoken monologue by David Attenborough over a discombobulated beat, A Fading Future gets off to a rather sobering start with ‘Holocene’. It’s an arresting beginning that demands your full attention, but it certainly befits such a weighty subject and no matter what activity you are undertaking, ‘Holocene’ has the ability to stop you in your tracks. In that respect it signposts the rest of the album and especially the following track ‘Retrograde’. Full of neat rhythms and nifty time changes, it places itself centre stage with a monolithic aesthetic. Employing the full dynamic range, it is both deep and wide, an all-encompassing feel which totally subsumes the listener. It makes good use of musical dynamics, using quieter sections to contrast the loud, each acting as a foil to highlight and enhance the other and the result is a song that fractures sound in every direction.
Having shared stages with artists as diverse as Raging Speedhorn and PolyMath, Solars definitely have a crossover appeal, and tracks such as ‘Doomscrolling’ are hard enough to attract souls from the metal community (especially those who like things veering towards the doomier end of the spectrum). There’s also some smart drum patterns that’ll appeal to fans of math rock while the shapeshifting nature of cuts like ‘A Hill To Die On’ will please fans of prog metal. However, it all feels very natural and comes from a band writing what they love, and it seems that others will love it, too.
It is no easy feat to turn an instrumental album into a concept album; without the vocals as a narration things could quite easily get muddled, yet A Fading Future is a treatise on the planet Earth and the picture it paints is rather dystopian. Reminding me of Spirit Of Eden-era Talk Talk (albeit far heavier), Solars really capture the essence of nature and paint their sound from a palate of rustic reds, conker browns and burnt yellow. It’s very organic, and it often grows as such; starting life as an emotive track with guitars that appear like green shoots, ‘Ablation’ takes on new form, almost imperceptibly, until it weighs heavy on the shoulders, like Atlas and the globe. But rather than being heavy and oppressive, ‘Ablation’ offers a moment of hope, and one which suggests we’ll be hearing much more from Solars.
Despite calling their album A Fading Future, tomorrow looks bright for Solars.
Track List:
- Holocene
- Retrograde
- Doomscrolling
- A Fading Future
- A Hill To Die On
- Inertia
- Ablation
