Austrian/German crew Glare of the Sun aren’t as much of a post-metal revelation as they are a reaffirmation of how to do the style some justice. There was a time when any monolith-rocker-come-lately would slap together a few heavier-than-thou riffs, gussie it up with some delicate interludes and come out of it with something resembling a song. But being that we are well past the point of no return for “post”-anything’s emergence, submergence, and divergence, the fact Glare of the Sun has been able to assemble such a cogent, cohesive bundle of jams on their –Soil– debut says a lot about a band who has been together since 2013.
Indeed Glare of the Sun is occasionally privy those soft, pretty melodic dances, like on the opening instrumental “Awoken” or “Degeneration,” the only song of the lot that employs clean vocals. That leaves the effacing “One Step Nothing” (the album’s best jam, bar none) and the crisp “Drowning and the Hush” to do the majority of post-metal grunt work. Sure, Glare of the Sun’s riff tangents and couplings aren’t anything fresh, yet the way in which they intertwine with downing clean channel guitar work generally gets the job done, as so found on “Groundwater” and the closing “Coldfront.”
Glare of the Sun’s Facebook tagline reads simply “There will be doom.” That paints only a part of the picture for a band with more to their arsenal than the standard-issue post and/or doom band. –Soil– is certainly the foundation-laying type of debut that bucks the recent trend of bands of a similar angle burning out before they can get started.