Review: Dark Suns

Dark Suns
“Swanlike”
(Voice of Life Records)

Dreamy music clinically designed in sound labs throughout Germany to lull the listener off into slumbery otherworldly place only to have the vocalist start growling like a bear with his paw in the beehive and snap that poor listener out of her trance.  This is the kind of metal that I would like to dub “Hippie Metal,” and not because it reminds of the Grateful Dead or jingly-jangly campfire anti-war songs like “And it’s one, two, three what are we fighting for?  Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn!  Next stop is at Saddam’s!  And it’s five, six, seven why’d we let Osama go?  There’s no time to wonder why.  Whoopee!  We’re all gonna die!”  No I don’t mean it’s hippie-ish metal in that sense. I mean it in that spiritual, new-agey, I have visions, I like crystals and tarot cards and toothpaste without any fluoride in it kind of way.  You know what I mean?  It’s that post-LSD existence after too many synapses have been permanently mutated by the shit and reality is a concept way beyond redemption by Kant or Descartes or The Matrix.

One last word on Dark Suns, “lumbering.”