Stay with Me When You're Gone

I went through a period of thinking that Rise To The Sky (just Sergio González actually) made albums too frequently and that the content changed little from song to song, but I’m wondering whether I’ve misjudged the Chilean and his project. That’s because Stay with Me When You’re Gone focuses on a very particular set of ideas, yet rather large differences can be seen when lining it up with the albums on either side. In this case, the 40 minute listen aims for doom death romanticism without much in the way of real heaviness, only the vocals touching on what one might expect from death metal. As such, the pace of these 7 cuts remains gradual, long movements of melodic evolution standing out as the album’s main feature, so that we are approximately in the territory of Saturnus or Swallow The Sun, and largely on the friendly side of that equation. I say friendly, but you can also mention crushing depression as a potential mood marker, even if I personally find this more uplifting than both Every Day, a Funeral and Two Years of Grief.

Considering the relative uniformity in pace, cutting down most of the tracks to under 7 minutes was a good idea. Everything seems to sprawl out anyway at this very relaxed ebb, with some melodic lines taking perhaps 15-20 seconds to complete one iteration, so curtailing the length of each cut creates more frequent breaks without destroying the atmosphere of the album as a whole. Most songs involve a brief opening sequence before getting going steadily, ‘A Time I Was Loved’ starting off the album with a violin introduction, which briefly gets a revisit on ‘Leave Me’ and ‘Life Passing By’, though more fully incorporated into the actual melody of the latter song. The closer, ‘True Love’, contains the only extended clean passages and even has more a funeral doom vibe, tempo adjustment near the end withstanding. That helps distinguish songs to some extent, yet I still get a bit lost in the grand scheme of things, seeing as the vocals never stand out that much and the construction of the music is similar. Now and then the percussion picks up a bit too, adding double bass to the crescendos of ‘Deep Wound to the Heart’ and ‘Life Passing By’, although the songs don’t actually change pace when that feature comes in, the slow melodic backing remaining unchanged and the drums rumbling beneath.

The most impressive songs gather near the end of the release for me. A cover of ‘Chervona Ruta’, performed in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, is adapted surprisingly easily into this style, the distinctive melody standing out with its East European flavour. ‘Leave Me’ seems like the liveliest of the bunch owing to more energetic rhythms, sounding sort of like Finnish melodeath for the hangover after all the vodka. At other moments, Stay with Me When You’re Gone does drift a little, or blend together, but in general it’s a statement of reflective beauty and loss that makes a fine addition to Rise To The Sky’s quickly growing catalogue.