Collection audit: Silent Planet – SUPERBLOOM
California metalcore horde Silent Planet blend djent, electro and shoegaze to inebriating impact on intriguing fifth collection SUPERBLOOM.
It’s interesting the way that activities change shape, now and again. The two-year composition and recording process for Silent Planet’s aggressive fifth collection was parted in half by a van crash during a Wyoming blizzard while on visit in November 2022, and the resultant 12-tune spread appears to have been broken by the experience. Thrillingly so. On one side, you have the profound electro-imbued djent they’d been working for the past 13 years, while on the other drains it could be said of practically heavenly, shoegazey wonder following their short brush with death.
That title, SUPERBLOOM, epitomizes the resultant soundscape well. A reference to the verdant wildflower shows that irregularly cover the bone-dry, ungracious California desert, it means an underpinning of horrendous alt.metal wreathed in vast synths and rippling vocal layers of despairing and wonder. Offworlder and Dreamwalker, for example, feel like they could be horrendous reward level offcuts from Mick Gordon’s Destruction soundtrack. However, tunes like Antimatter exchange such brutal quickness for throbbing notches and thick science fiction atmospherics fixated on the perpetuation of space.
Silent Planet – Antimatter (Official Music Video)
A cumbersomeness disturbs the equilibrium, incidentally. Overproduction denies phenomenal vocal exhibitions of their mankind to jostling impact to a great extent, and a couple of seconds of sheer Meshuggah-styled weight fail to measure up to the intricacy somewhere else. Yet, the capacity to utter sounds that are universally on-pattern nowadays feel new and really front line should be commended. Furthermore, when the title-track closes SUPERBLOOM’s free outsider story in a crescendo of raspy extreme emotion, you’ll be prepared to follow Silent Planet to endlessness and then some. Give these chaps their blossoms.
Decision: 4/5
For fanatics of: Present to Me The Skyline, Outskirts, Rest Token
SUPERBLOOM is out November 3 by means of Strong State
