Heavens Fall – Desert Sun (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

One of my main gripes with rock music in the modern age is that it has forgotten the one thing it owes its very existence to. The Groove. It seems as if, to a large degree, much of the music made in the genre currently looks so eager to prove how loud, and fast, and heavy it can be, or at the other extreme, has been seduced by the style over substance of the mainstream indie market, that most of it the music has been rendered unsatisfying to those of us old enough to remember what it used to sound like. Thankfully, Desert Sun remembers what it used to sound like and seems on a mission to remind us.

Heavens Fall, their new album, is full of groove, which, for the uninitiated, is the sound of incendiary riffs and clever hooks, thunderous energies, and infectious beats all coming together in unison. The result is an album of hard and heavy tracks that scale anthemic and euphoric sonic heights but which also remain accessible, even to the point of being danceable.

If heavy metal is happy to cover itself in monolithic bombast in an attempt to look big and clever and indie-rock is still looking at itself in the mirror, admiring its designer labels and complicated hair, honest, old-school, authentic rock music is just getting on with the job at hand. And as Heavens Fall proves, that job is to make music that is big enough to destroy worlds yet clever enough to get the club boogieing along, pint in hand, fist in the air, singing every lyric back to you. The apocalypse never sounded so great!

Violent Room is a killer opening statement of intent, staccato riffs driving an anthemic sonic grandeur right from the off. This is classic rock, infused with just enough alternative vibes to keep things brilliantly up to date. Inside shows that they know their way around the art of building anticipation, the song a quarter of the way through before its explosive reveal, and Woke Up This Morning shows that the band can build soundscapes every bit as big and bombastic, snarling and raw as their metal brothers, but do so without sacrificing any of that melody for muscle, any of that groove for grit.

And then there are songs such as Time, which you wouldn’t quite call a ballad, more an exercise in ambient rock soundscaping, that show that for all their power, Desert Sun can also do poignancy, the song woven from sonic shards and fleeting sounds rather than the usual killer riffs.

Rock music, it would seem, is back on the menu. And then some!

Website