8/31/20
1:57 AM
Growing up in the 2000’s, a lot of the songs on the radio (before streaming platforms, it was either CDs or radio) drew up to be a large part of my musical palette. Obviously mainstream rap artists like Lil Wayne or Kanye are some of my first steps into music as a whole, but another facet to my music taste can be accredited to pop punk, emo, progressive, and post rock, all of which started taking off from the early 2000’s into the 2010’s and accounted for a lot the music that I would listen to in the following years.
Circa Survive’s Blue Sky Noise meant a lot for me— I still remember one of my friends had recommended this album to me because it had interweaved each track into the next. The seemingly continuous feel of this album in which different songs felt like one connected track was something we’d never really heard before and that gave merit in listening to this album from front to back. It was one of the first albums that I’d listened to all the way through, and one of the first steps I took towards opening up to more progressive and heavier forms of music.
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From the first minute of Blue Sky Noise, Circa Survive boasts of their charisma, intensity, and the individuality of their sound, and while Anthony Green might be the most recognizable member of Circa Survive as its frontman and vocalist, every instrumentalist is substantial in contribution, and the overall level of performance of the band is quite remarkable throughout the project where each musician in the band plays a crucial role; the mathematic and rhythmic nature of their music is executed by the combination of heavy driving bass lines, the sharp and percussive drums in odd time signatures, and the frenetic, yet meticulous lead guitar riffs. The balance between the instrumentation and vocal components is delivered in both an intricate and aggressive manner to attack listeners while maintaining a stability by staggering between compact and bareness in composition.
Within Circa Survive’s discography, Blue Sky Noise seems like the perfect balance between the band’s first two albums— five years prior was their debut piece Juturna, and three after was On Letting Go— Circa Survive took from the cryptic and enigmatic elements of their music and refined their sound to a more digestible tonality. Blue Sky Noise is cohesively adherent to Circa Survives’ imagery and thematic foundations in the sense that it takes from some of their earlier releases and improves upon the positives while detracting some critical qualities, successfully creating an album with the strong points of the previous work. The entire aesthetic of this project both visually and sonically evolved the band’s persona; the creepy progressive sound was met often with symbolic and enigmatic artistry, but the overall musicality became more adaptable to cater for a wider audience while holding onto their initial eccentricity.
From their debut album Juturna, the remnants of depressive and despondent air in Circa’s music still lingers, but is found amongst more admissible and azure tones that made the album more welcoming in a sense. However, the complexities of their style remained as the duality within this album comes back to the lyricism and writing; while Blue Sky Noise’s artwork and overall sound became much brighter, Anthony Green’s writing saw to a more tragic and morose narrative than before. Hidden underneath the mask of technicality, near-scientific melodies, and musical architecture, detailed accounts of his wife’s two miscarriages and the struggles with addictions plagued Green throughout the writing and production of the album. Blue Sky Noise unearths misery and dreariness of a man riddled with guilt and abjection, but also alleviates the scars caused in these haunting realities by portraying the deadening tales in Green’s lyrics and contrasting them with violent waves of liberating anecdotes embracing acceptance and hope to bring the album back in full circle.
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Perhaps the genius within this album lies beneath the attention required in finding it; while the grandeur of Blue Sky Noise in its openness may attract more audiences on the surfaces, the amount of detail and vulnerability revealed in some of the darkest moments give profuse amounts of depth in this project, making each song worth the cautionary listen.
Listen to the album below: