Greece have gave me some interesting bands to listen to over the past 18 months, the two most notable being Speedblow, a five piece melodic death metal come stoner groove metal band and progressive metallers Mother of Millions whose debut album made it into my top 10 for 2014. Now they give me Sun, Rain In Life, a group who are heavily influenced by alternative rock and grunge. Reading the concept for this album (yeah, a grunge concept album?!) and the lyrics, I discovered that this was about a mental and spiritual awakening which plays into the title, the idea that 96% of our actions are unconscious whilst 4% are the ones we are only aware of. Given that Greece was the birthplace of many philosophers, let’s see if this existential awakening of an album is worth giving thought to.
From the off, it has that early 90’s grunge sound – the moody edge, slow pace and heavy sounding bass-lines. For a moment I thought it was something similar to the Smashing Pumpkins and when the vocals came in, it confirmed this thought for me. It has that nasal-almost whiney tone to it which for some people works wonderful and for others, it is extremely hard to get past, but it does fit well with the music backing it up so in some ways, it can’t all be that bad vocally.
Track wise, it’s what you’d expect from a band with a heavy set influence in the 90’s alternative rock and grunge approach. The songs are relatively stripped back and simple with clear sections. The ‘Intro-Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Middle-Chorus’ style structure helps you keep up with where you are in case you snap out, and the dynamics work well, especially when it kicks in for the choruses. Despite this, the album is a rather slow starter. Maybe it is because recently I’ve been listening to things with more of a kick to them, but the slow and steady pace just didn’t get my attention until the third track “Stools”. This track has a decent kick to it, some real good crunchy distortion and hard rock styled chugging guitars with a great bass-line and it gets louder as it goes on. “Mirror”, later on in the album has the same style of impact and it is in these tracks where the band show their ability to write a catchy hook chorus which makes it suitable for radio airplay.
Where Sun, Rain In Life do excel though on this album is in the more expressive and emotionally charged songs. “Walk With Me” has a good uplifting feel to it with its bright sounding clean melody which later is joined with some crisp overdriven guitars and some real passionate singing which actually gets you identifying with the lyrical content and the following track, “Letter” is more subdued with its sound, but the reflective theme of the song and the slight moody atmosphere it creates is good, as is the real raw and passionate sounding chorus section. Arguably though, the best track of the album is the closer, “Fail” which given its lyrical content, is actually quite apt to current events – the recent tragedy in France. With lyrics which reflect how if one part of something ceases to work the way it should, the knock on effect means everything ceases (‘When one of us fails/We all fail along as one’), it is a dark reminder of humanity and it ties in with the album’s theme which argues that 96% of our actions are all unconscious – if we don’t do anything and don’t realise we are doing nothing, then we will fail.
On the whole, it is an interesting concept. Musically, its stripped down and simplistic which can be effective and it is an expressive release with how it conveys the ideas contained in it, however, it’s just not quite as attention getting as it could be. Slow paced for the majority and with a sound reminiscent of one of the grunge bands I never liked, nor understood the hype around, it doesn’t really stand out to me as anything above good background music. Sun, Rain In Life do have potential though, I cannot deny them that, I just didn’t get much satisfaction out of this thought provoking album.
(6/10 Fraggle)
Leave a Reply