Deafheaven is a band that certainly receives a lot of unneeded discontent and hatred from a lot of the more "kvlt" black metal purists. This is very much attributed to their implementation of post-rock and shoegazing music into their overall black metal-tinged sound. After releasing a very promising demo in 2010 and an EP containing two rerecorded tracks, Deafheaven explodes into the metal scene with their debut full-length studio album "Roads to Judah" released in spring of 2011. My first encounter with this group was only a few weeks after its release, thanks to an advertisement I saw somewhere on the internet. Originally, I just couldn't get into this album. I can't even explain why; there was just something that, to me, was very off-putting about this record. I finally decided to revisit this album during the autumn of that year. Since then, it has been an album I come back to after a very long day just to sit and vibe, awaiting the impending dawn. I've been on a bit of a post-rock kick this week, so especially now, this album has been one of my best musical friends. So, what makes this album so great?
Simply put, it is a conundrum of amazing musical incorporations. Obviously, thanks to the fast-paced tremolo riffing and blast beats, this is in fact mainly a black metal album, like it or not. There are some people who would argue that fact because they don't think it sounds raw or "true" enough. Also, this album makes a heavy use of post-rock and shoegaze. The end of the astronomically beautiful and emotional "Violet" definitely showcases this, with soaring guitars that override everything and bring an extremely warm sound to the music. Wait, what? Warm? Isn't black metal supposed to be cold? In Deafheaven's case, nope. This is not black metal in the same vein as early Darkthrone or Emperor. We don't get feelings of frozen, northern forest with this. Instead, we get feelings of summer and sunlight, which is also quite atypical for a lot of black metal. Another example of a very warm, soaring guitar segment is the soaring riff that begins about 2:50 into the song "Language Games". For some reason, this riff sounds quite familiar to me. Actually, it's a very simple guitar melody that has been done before by the extremely underground French black/dark ambient artist Aäkon Këëtrëh on his 1996 demo tape "Dans la forêt...", specifically with the keyboard melody on the first track. I'm sure not a lot of people will think to make that connection and even fewer will know what I'm talking about, but for me, it was fairly obvious. I'm not sure if Deafheaven is aware of this either but that really doesn't matter. "Language Games" also contains a beautiful post-rock section of clean guitars accompanied by a rolling drum pattern, and then finally closes with an extremely melodic, dreary riff.
The production on this album is extremely well done. It's not completely clean, so we get that amazing atmosphere that is supposed to come with black metal. However, it's raw in a different way. Like I said before, instead of going for a cold, desolate atmosphere, we get a fresh, warm, one could say breezy, atmosphere. This is fairly different for black metal and one of the reasons this band gets so much negative attention from a lot of the purists. All the instruments are audible, save for the bass, but that's to be expected. However, some instruments are certainly louder than others. This is especially the case with the drums. They are quite loud overall and tend to override the guitars at some points, however, the guitars do remain audible. There is a lot of double bass in the drumming, and an extremely healthy amount of blast beats to go around. Sure, this drummer is extremely talented, but my favorite moments of his playing has to be when he executes "drum rolls". This occurs most notably in the earlier mentioned "Language Games" and the final song on the album, "Tunnel of Trees", about 1:50 into the song. "Tunnel of Trees", out of all four songs, contains my favorite drumming throughout the album. It's just so chaotic yet controlled extremely well.
Emotion is a key ingredient to this album, as it is with most black metal. You can literally feel the emotion radiate through the instruments. If this could be compared to any other band, it would probably be Alcest, but only in terms of emotional energy. Vocally speaking, it's quite different. Unlike Neige from Alcest who utilizes a much cleaner voice focusing on singing, the vocalist here, George Clarke, uses the standard harsh, raspy vocals common in black metal. This helps enhance the emotional output by quite a bit. There is no clean singing to be heard anywhere on this album, so if you came here expecting to hear something like Alcest in this regard, you wasted your time.
So, this album is not perfect. It has its flaws, but they're not game-breaking flaws. My biggest and really only complaint with this album is that it's four tracks and extremely short. Don't get me wrong, tons of black metal bands have albums with four or so tracks on them, and this seems to be a standard thing for the more atmospheric bands. However, a lot of these albums are longer in terms of overall run time. This record certainly could have used a few more minutes on certain songs and probably ten minutes added to the total length. Still, this is not a big issue. Considering this is Deafheaven's freshman album, it is certainly a good starting point. To me, this album is only a nice taste of the brilliance that would come two years later on the absolutely amazing, yet infamous and controversial "Sunbather". Make note, my friends, that just because a band is not popular with a large portion of a community, does not mean it's bad. This band certainly has a lot going for them and they definitely should not be slept on.