If I stop and think about it for a few minutes, the reason that I find bands like The Silent Era so great—not that there are many like The Silent Era—is that they take their sonic building blocks from all of the genres I love and use them to create their own, new sonic architecture. And given that my tastes err on the dark and heavy—goth, alt-rock, shoegaze, industrial—that’s a lot to work with.
There is an art to weaving together such weighty sonics, and as “Oscillations” shows, like their singles before it, they have mastered this art to perfection. Heavy music is often dense and claustrophobic, but here, even in the most driven moments, the feeling is cool and anthemic, atmospheric, and, perhaps, even euphoric.
Driven by that cold, clinical, motorik drum sound, brooding bass line, and coiled in snakelike, razor-wire guitar riffs, Bri Macanas delivers an already impressive vocal. But as the raw, walls of guitar crash down, how she matches the sonic excess around her will take your breath away.
Although it proves to be sonic excess just as a point of musical punctuation only, not bombast for the sake of it, from here, The Silent Era shapes the song by switching between the cooler, dark, dreamwave sounds and the explosive and effervescent sonics into gorgeous and brutal soundscapes. This is the sound of dark dynamics working brilliantly.
Yes, The Silent Era may have perfected the art of blending those dark and delicious sonics, but it is their ability to take such established sounds and still build something refreshing and unique out of them, a skill that sets them head and shoulders above the other denizens of the night.
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