Another Heaven
Iv: Heaven Sent
"HEAVEN SENT," the fourth release by mid-American Sludgegaze band Another Heaven, finds the band expanding in more ways than one. Now a four-piece (with the addition of a second guitarist), the music is both more vast in scope and more bracing in its use of ideas and sounds from Heavy Music. "Down" - for example - erupts in a flash of pure noise before resolving into a deceptively pretty chorus, while "Arab Stardust" alternates between gently picked verses and scathing 90s-rock choruses as it explores the horror of being not-white in America. Elsewhere, screamed post-hardcore vocals (the lumbering noise rock of "Eternal") collide with layered harmonies (the pristine 90s shoegaze of the Karl Ove Knausgard-inspired "Luxury Funeral") and brutal breakdowns emerge from clouds of hazy guitar sparkle - like some unhinged weirdo flipping a radio between stations playing Stereolab and Oxbow ("Erased" and "The Light," natch).