Apart from, sadly still, nicotine I’m no consumer of drugs (and don’t plan to ever do so) and as such THE ATLAS MOTH are quite fitting to show musically how a confusing and sometimes scary a drug trip might feel like. At least to me as someone lacking knowledge their album A Glorified Piece Of Blue Sky, meaning the contained music, carries a feel of the use of various, say, “ingredients”.
After multiple use of this “musical substance” I have to say that I’m neither feeling comfortably high nor feel a form of addiction. Ok, THE ATLAS MOTH don’t want to produce a comfortable feel and, if staying in drug terms, they surely wanted to create an audible form of a LSD horror trip with some minor breaks for taking breath. THE ATLAS MOTH indeed have been quite successful with the scoring of this and the guys from America’s swamps definitely show musical, better: instrumental, qualities here.
The eight songs on A Glorified Piece Of Blue Sky show up a variety of influences and overall come a long rather unconventional and sometimes even very experimental. In addition to their individual instrumental approach THE ATLAS MOTH also make use of three different vocal styles to put a final touch to their darkly mad Sludge songs. One is sounding like a deeper and angrier Phil Anselmo, another one with a really good clean voice and a third one clad in the form of hysteric screaming. And exactly this screaming, which surely underlines the aspect of a horror trip, not only requires a lot of the listener’s endurance but frankly speaking completely annoys me. I absolutely have no objections towards screaming vocals, in fact, being a fan of Black Metal, often like this a lot but what’s coming out of the speakers here just sounds like a slaughtered swamp rat and totally sucks!
Too bad… Because apart from some minor fritters the songs themselves are highly interesting and actually really good. Regardless if THE ATLAS MOTH like in the last third of Grey Wolves or in One Amongst The Wheat Fields fish in the waters of dirty Cathedral or Down influenced Doom, build up massive Neurosis-like walls of sound or by the use of the clean vocals and synthies create an as well spacey as well nightmarish atmosphere like in Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence or Jump Room To Orion - it’s always the terrible screaming voice ruining the build up feeling and which can be called fitting only at some very few passages.
With a more prominent use of the great clean vocals and the abandonment of the swamp rat – A Glorified Piece Of Blue Sky would have gotten a clear recommendation in the form of eight points. But the mentioned heavy flaw of the screaming vocals definitely puts down any feel of addiction and shrinks down the rating down to six points. A lot of potential has been wasted here. As said before… too bad…