Review Summary: An Autumn for Crippled Children's second album shows them brightening up the horizons.
Last year, An Autumn for Crippled Children burst onto the black metal scene with their debut album,
Lost, and are back only a little over a year later with their second full-length album,
Everything. Now the band was commended on their first album for blending together a very depressing style of black metal with post-rock and shoegaze influences. Well their second album still blends those styles together, but also shows the band progressing into a lot more than that with a lot more emphasis on the shoegaze elements.
For starters, the overall feel on this album is a lot happier than it was on the first album. Now most of you are probably thinking that depressive black metal and happiness shouldn't and couldn't go together, but An Autumn for Crippled Children make it work here. Even the black metal parts are joyful sounding, so even calling it depressive black metal would be kind of a stretch.
Everything is pretty much a contrast to everything that
Lost was. While the latter made you feel down and full of despair and anguish, the former gives off a feeling of redemption and satisfaction. Take for example the piano part at the beginning of the third track Absence of Contrast. You can't say that there's anything hopeless or depressing about that as much as you can say it just makes the album sound beautiful.
You could almost compare this band to Alcest with the way they started off as exclusively a black metal band, but have now gone onto more shoegaze with heavy black metal influences. There's way too much going on here to just call this a black metal album. The riffs are clean and very smooth and soothing almost. Atmospherically this album is like you're lost somewhere in a dream or floating in the clouds. It just gives you a very surreal and joyful feeling when you listen to it. The only thing that really heavily resembles black metal here is the vocals. The majority of the time you'll get a high pitched shriek that isn't too high in the mix and that is heavily distorted. Sometimes they'll even hit you with the cleanly sung vocals on I Am the Veil and Rain, which weren't present at all on the first album, so it's a nice change every once in a while.
While
Everything probably isn't as good as the previous album, it's still nice to hear that An Autumn for Crippled Children have progressed and it's still a very great album in it's own right. Like I mentioned, it's pretty much a complete contrast to the first album and listening to them back-to-back will give the listener an interesting experience. It's like going from hell straight to heaven. This band isn't just another ripoff, they're certainly something special.
