Review Summary: The Malaysian post-rockers create an album best described by its title.
With a quick listen Deepset’s first and only album,
The Lights We Shed Shall Burn Your Eyes, may sound just like every other instrumental post-rock album. However, while strictly following the modern post-rock sound, the Malaysian band creates an album full of both soothing and brooding melodies to make
The Lights We Shed Shall Burn Your Eyes feel like a huge emotional rollercoaster. They don’t necessarily use the long build-ups that characterize the whole genre, but instead the songs go from soft to heavy and back to soft again which induces the magnificent feels and never fails to give chills.
The Lights We Shed Shall Burn Your Eyes kicks off with the shortest song of the album, “Put Your Dreams to Sleep”. The opener shows exactly what the album is going to be like. It starts with a gentle melody that bursts out to a heavy second half. Throughout the album, the soft parts are mellow and upbeat while the heavy parts bring a lot more melancholic feeling. The melancholy is most apparent in the heaviest track of the album, “Have You Ever Danced With the Devil Under the Pale Moonlight?” The album’s most downright brooding song has its clean part in the middle of the song, bringing a fresh break from the heavy sound but unlike the other light parts on the album it still keeps the dark atmosphere the song thoroughly has. Another relatively heavy track, “Where Were They? – When the Fun Went Out” shows Deepset’s true talent in writing post-rock that mixes both light and dark atmosphere as the song has several changes in heaviness, all of which succeed superbly.
The two longest tracks on
The Lights We Shed Shall Burn Your Eyes are both placed in the end of the album. While “Have You Ever Danced With the Devil Under the Pale Moonlight?” showed the band’s dark side, the last two songs, “If You Can Still Hear This Whispering, You Are Dying” and “Every Instance in Time Is a Journey of Hope” are by far the lightest songs on the album. Especially the latter of these, the almost 13-minute album closer, draws a lot of comparisons to acts like
Explosions in the Sky. This is also the only time on the album we can hear a typical build-up from relatively quiet beginning to loud ending. However, while these songs may not be the musically the most creative ones they still manage to be emotionally appropriate and are worthy as the epic closing tracks of the album.
While Deepset doesn’t bring musically anything new to the table,
The Lights We Shed Shall Burn Your Eyes is an extremely enjoyable album and a real emotional rollercoaster that really sheds a bright light in the post-rock scene.
