Release Date: 10 October 2025
Song Count: 10
Rating: 6.6/10
Description:
(Note: Written and published past midnight.)
Today's album is the second one of up-and-coming American hard rock band Soul Blind, Red Sky Mourning. Following through with the rock music kick that the album of yesterday induced in me, this was a listen reminiscent of many famous rock acts and sounds combined into one inspired style, packed up into a 34-minute long collection.
The tracks are made of loud and heavy rock instrumentals, and together with the varied types of vocals from clean-sung to raspy or full-on growling, they give off a bit of a similar energy to other well-known hard rock bands and their works, such as Deftones and Chevelle - albeit with more daringness to go even heavier and truly extract every drop of power from the sounds of the guitars, bass, drums and the lead vocalist's passion-filled singing. The songs further also try some rather interesting directions with the way they go, experimenting with different kinds of melodies, structures of songs and even unconventional time signatures, with a chunk of the track "Billy" being in an odd 7/8 tact, all likely to stand out from everything else in the album.
Unfortunately, this is a problem that Red Sky Mourning bears regardless of these attempts, as not all of the tracks manage to break through from the fate of simply being noise in the background, even in spite of playing around with their musicalities. While this kind of music is a genre I naturally gravitate towards out of enjoyment, a significant assortment of the album's tracks had me mentally checked out after the initial few seconds, because the amount of variance in sound volume and noise both within an individual song and across all of the songs doesn't flunctuate much at all, causing the listener to be susceptible to growing tired of the experience after some time.
Highlight tracks that overcome this pattern include the aforementioned "Billy", the opener "Business Or Pleasure", the closing track "Closer To You", and "Hide Your Evil", the clear favourite with great amounts of energy and management of when to go all in with it and when to step back and lead into these electric segments.
Overall, Red Sky Mourning is a strong and well-made hard rock album with quite a lot of quality and talent put behind it, even in spite of some of its drawbacks keeping me from cherishing this album from a genre I usually adore much further.