Make no mistake, for all the artsy dialogue and ten-cent words that are thrown out to describe this particular brand of instrumental mood music, Cloudkicker has quite a few heavy grooves spread throughout its discography - and hearing those moments of sheer headbanging goodness makes for a great time. It means we get the longer songs that defined some earlier work and we also get a return to the serious heaviness, too. The realization that Subsume is everything Cloudkicker in four songs is exciting. You could probably run one into the other and make “Warmth” one of the longer songs on this disc, although “A weatherfront…” still takes the cake at around sixteen and a half minutes. Opening song “The Warmth Of The Daytime Seemed Like A Dream Now” is like a continuation of what started on Hello, especially given its opening few moments of relative quiet. You could probably spend a few days dissecting each song underneath a microscope, finding different pieces of New Heavenly Body, Let Yourself Be Huge, Fade, Beacons, and even some of the experiments from Loop. So as soon as you hit “He would be riding on the subway or writing formulas on the blackboard or having a meal or (as now) sitting and talking to someone across a table, and it would envelop him like a soundless tsunami” (which I will henceforth refer to as “Hwbrotsowfotbohamoansattsaataiwehlast”) that picture immediately is placed in your mind and you envision wholly different scenarios playing out as the songs change motifs and shift from movement to movement.Īs moods change and spread across the four songs present, you start to realize that Subsume is the culmination of everything Cloudkicker thus far. Instead, Subsume feels like it is a soundtrack to a life, and the song titles point the listener in that direction. A more popular and overused phrase would be, “A soundtrack for a movie that doesn’t exist”, but it doesn’t fully feel like that in this case. The song titles on this disc are breathlessly long, suggesting that the whole album is a story and a soundtrack, all in one. Subsume is a full release but exists in only four movements. This thought has shifted now, as I sit here with Cloudkicker’s 2013 release on constant repeat.

I never expected Cloudkicker to try to come close to Beacons again this doesn’t seem like the type of project that strives to reach the same highs as before, instead varying things up and showing different elements of music to be appreciated. There were always elements of it in other works, and so part of the enjoyment of them came from seeking those moments, alongside enjoying the music. However, and I willingly admit that part of this may be due to nostalgia, Beacons has still remained above them all for me – because it felt like it had all of what would later be parceled out among later releases. Whether acoustic and soft or buried in reverb and distortion, they’ve all been favorite pieces of music. Every disc that has come out under the Cloudkicker banner since then has always ranked high on this end. Beacons told a story without words, and with every release since then Cloudkicker has sought to accomplish something similar, even when completely shying away from all the technicality, time signatures, and endless scales, and instead sticking with melodic, acoustic pieces that fell way more into the post- and prog circles than they did the metal ones. However, we have proven as a community that we can recognize and appreciate good music regardless of style, and so seeing this project embraced, as one of the fans who got to do so with the zeitgeist around Beacons, has been great.

The whole outbreak of guitarists suddenly showing their skill and technicality seemed amazing, but over time they had all started to blur together, and eventually would feel as if they were coalescing into one big, blob of stuff that took years of practice but had started to matter only to those who also played that style.Ĭloudkicker was able to weave into that style a sense for ambiance and mood, using a guitar to paint pictures to go along with long, descriptive song titles (which have now proven to become a signature). In an explosion of solo basement/bedroom/wherever-they-could-hook-up-their-recording-gear guitarist experiments, Beacon seemed like something different and fresh – even if it bore the same signatures of the scene from which it was born. When Cloudkicker released Beacons back in 2010, it was a heavy contender for album of the year. Subsume, which hit this year, is the latest in a long line of excellent releases. At this point the project has quite a few releases under its belt and all of them have been available for “name your own price” for some time now. (Here’s DGR’s review of the latest album by one-man phenom Cloudkicker.)įor those of you not in the know, Cloudkicker is a solo guitar project of one Ben Sharp.

Subsume your life