Sometimes instrumental albums work and sometimes they don’t, and unfortunately for Amute’s Savage Bliss, this is an album that falls into the latter category.
There’s nothing that instantly grabs you about the songs and they sound unfinished at times, almost like there’s something missing from them, and they don’t quite blend together – it’s like the album contains eight completely seperate ideas and it doesn’t flow all that well as a result. It’s, in fact, largely difficult to connect with the majority of the songs because there’s no standout features to them – the easiest way to describe the songs are as a collection of sounds.
It’s ambient, but perhaps a little too ambient, with repeating sounds and ideas that just don’t seem to go anywhere, looping over and over with no real direction and most of the time it does feel like it’s just background sounds. That’s not saying there are no redeeming features about the album because the melodic tones contained in The Short Mess are excellent and the way closing track Savage Bliss drifts away at the end is an apt way to finish things off.
I get what Amute is trying to do with this album but for me personally it just feels like background noise. Still, it’s a bold release and at five albums into Amute’s career, you can’t deny that this is a format that works well for the project – however, it’s not for me.
2/10
