Tombstones in Their Eyes don’t make music so much as startling soundtracks, cavernous walls of noise laced with drama, druggy haze and stygian doom, and their latest single is no exception. The vocals are deliberately set deep within the guitars intense deliveries obscuring the lyrics to the point that they also become a haunting instrument in their own right adding to the dark, otherworldliness of the proceedings. Forget the traditional verse-chorus approach, here the dynamic of the song is built around a hypnotic and claustrophobic delivery which swaps traditional melody for an intense attack on the senses, a beguiling two-chord salvo of sky-scrapping sound, a musical blunt instrument to deliver a sonic trauma.
But there is beauty in their sound too, not the obvious beauty of the mainstream, but the striking and beguiling addiction of the odd, the other and the outsider. Their music is the fog of sonic war, the roar of industry, the collision of worlds, the destruction of buildings, the reduction of music to its base urges, the dark underbelly that skitters further from scary and closer to addictive with each play. Open Skies, like all of their music, is a song which you have to work at to get the rewards, but once there you will feel like you have earned the respect of such mercurial music and it is your own private world. And when you finally fall for their strange charms you will never settle for music which is obvious, unchallenging or compromising ever again.
