Review Summary: "Blue Sky Noise" marries Circa Survive's trademark aesthetic to a more traditional form of songwriting almost seamlessly.
I don’t really write reviews for albums that aren’t recent, and I don’t have much experience with it. But now that Circa Survive’s latest album "Desensus" has arrived and had a chance to settle a bit in our minds, I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at one of Circa’s fan favorite albums - and their only album released on a major label – "Blue Sky Noise".
Black sheeps in a band’s discography can often be heavily derided by fans for being horrible (Morbid Angel’s "Illud Divinum Insanus" comes to mind), or by simply not staying true to the perceived “vision” of the band. Part of this is, at the moment of release, fans have no way of knowing whether the change in direction is permanent or just an experiment. Even the band themselves usually have no idea. So it’s only with time that we can look at these albums fairly and give them the praise – or thrashing – that they deserve.
For the uninitiated, Circa Survive is usually known for being a bleak and wintery band. Their music washes over you like ice water, and the spacy, ethereal atmospheres the band creates are perfect for long drives through the snow on a cold night with the heat on just low enough for you to feel the chill from outside. This isn’t to say that their music isn’t hooky or fun, but they were very much a band that placed atmosphere at a level just as or even more important than songwriting.
With "Blue Sky Noise", this dichotomy changed almost entirely. The echoy guitars and emotional vocals were thrown into an environment where hooks and songwriting were king, and their progressive rock influences were benched in favor of a more catchy and immediate sound. The instruments served the song, and not vice versa. It was almost certainly the result of direct or indirect major label influence, but it was working in the band’s favor. The chorus’ in songs like “Glass Arrows” were more immense than anything they had ever previously attempted, and others like “I Felt Free” incorporated the band’s use of atmosphere in a more accessible way. “Imaginary Enemy” used rhythm to create hooks in ways no previous Circa record could even dream of. With money from Atlantic, the production was much clearer than the Equal Vision records – “Strange Terrain” opens with gorgeously punchy clean guitars that thankfully no one felt needed delay put on them, although “Dyed In The Wool” proves that drenching them in reverb sounds better than ever.
What’s even more impressive is how much this still feels like a Circa Survive album, despite its slew of departures from the earlier (and later) material. "Blue Sky Noise" manages to marry the Circa aesthetic to traditional songwriting almost seamlessly. Anthony Green sounds a bit more restrained here, because given the more tightly constructed nature of the songs, he doesn’t have as much room to stretch his voice. But his tone is so well suited to the catchy vocal melodies he’s tasked himself with that it hardly even matters, and he still explodes when he gets the opportunity. The rest of the band finally possesses the energy to pick up his slack, and even with the overall complexity of the music reduced, it feels much more like they’re working in tandem with each other, rather than the band serving as the soundtrack to Green’s emotional apocalypse.
"Blue Sky Noise" sounds even better now that we know it’s likely the only album of its kind we’ll be receiving from the band. 2012’s "Violent Waves", self-released by the band and later reissued on their current label Sumerian Records, was somewhat of a return to form, keeping some of the catchier influences but slowing things down again and getting the band back to its art-rock roots. Circa is a band that always stays similar enough to not be alienating but isn’t afraid to show itself in different forms, and this remains the largest departure from their original sound yet. "Blue Sky Noise" is an absolute classic, loaded with killer songs front to back. It says a lot about a band when their biggest experiment also remains arguably their biggest success, and hopefully Circa will keep experimenting for years to come.
