Prog music and its penchant for the grandiose are well documented. The debut from Earthside lends itself to the soaring accompaniment that sees mountains fly past and valleys plunged into eventually meeting the sea for that all important dive. Yes! It’s prog-rock, the soundtrack for a quick history of mankind and all its dreadful glory.
With all it’s roughness A Dream In Static is pretty tight and tidy, neurotically so. Its dynamic curves range from slight to impressively moving. With every constructed whisper carefully planned on the recording. There is a lack of drive behind this debut and this is really when it plummets in to predictable contrasts.
Earthside have done well in creating documentary soundscaping. A Dream In Static is at worst two dimensional and its stride is not reaching too far into anything undiscovered. It’s progressive but it’s working in concentric spirals from the idea of epic; and yet the depth is lost to indulgent sections that emphasize the sybaritic building of sonic architecture on dour streets, often forgetting the tone and almost making like an argument.
If you were needing a musical comparison though try Muse blended with Apocalyptica or if you were wanting parentage try the bastard child of an Alcestuous relationship between Anathema and Devin Townsends’ Terria era.
7/10
