Monstrous distortion. Sweet dreampop synthesizers. Aching, gentle melodies.

Rabbits.

Oh yeah, this one hooked me instantly. The incredibly beautiful and nostalgic shoegaze Sadness creates is highly corrosive, but in spite of this, it's interesting to see how the band (and this album in particular) has been fully embraced by the "post-rock" crowd. Even with the darker, harsher energies at work in the deeper foundations of the music. As a friend to all rabbits, the album art instantly hooked me, but the music itself scratches a deep itch for blown-out, shadowy shoegaze rock that it delivers quite nicely. It's also one of many releases from the band, almost Trha-level prolific. But then I realized that this is Trha. One of several alter-ego projects from Damián Ojeda. If you're already bewitched by Sadness's sound, this one is one of the more distinctive albums in the bands catalog. But it's also a perfect starting point for anyone new to Ojeda's blasting 'gazer gloom.

Simply put, Sadness is Ojeda's dark jangle-pop alter ego. His recognizable melodic style carries over from his other projects, but the songwriting here is more delicate and vulnerable. As "See You In The Orange Light" opens the album, the gentle, serene guitar melody and distant, muffled drums call back to the gloomier corners of low-fi bedroom-pop of the early 1990s as he softly plucks out a simple, solemn arpeggio. But then it quickly builds into this eruption of total static distortion, and Sadness's sound suddenly transforms into this huge wall of melodic hiss and fuzz, a massive blanket of textural distorted sound falling over it all. And then the vocals come in, and they are this strangely innocent, childlike choral sound that soars over the whole blown-out, a chorus of kids singing their hearts out over this clipping, roiling mass of mournful noise-pop. It's fuckin' great. The distortion is so over the top and over-modulated that it feels as if it's breaking and shattering in front of you, but the jangling, minor-key melody and drums are always there, that incredible hook repeating over and over again, obscured but still visible within the churning noise. There's this orchestral-synth sound that joins those haunting androgynous vocals, sweetened strains of faux-strings fused to that weird la-la-la singing, eventually taking over as the distortion and noise burns off like morning fog, the song fading out into emptiness.

The entire album is like this, songs like "Orange Love" and "On A Green" blasting you with drenching synesthetic distortion and increasingly synth-pop style keyboards, the former erupting into a more upbeat, insanely catchy pop song while the vocals morph from that twee, naif-like innocence into a scathing, pained shriek, but with sweeping childlike background chorales. There's really nothing of the black metal influences that color other Ojeda projects, there's nothing dark or menacing about Sadness's sound. In actuality, it's ecstatic and exhilarating, incorporating muffled drum breaks that build into techno-like climaxes of rhythmic bliss, hints of dreamy electronica buried in the roaring joyous pandemonium. Describing this as "catchy" is a real understatement, as each song possesses an inescapable earworm hook that bathes everything in a luminous glow. "Green" brings back those moody jangling guitars before it likewise detonates into a blissed-out empyrean beauty, those aching, multi-tracked vocals ascending over more saccharine synth-pop keyboards and another driving backbeat. It blew me away with its idiosyncratic but perfect production that marries murk and majesty in perfect balance. Wow. These lengthy songs (usually stretching out for seven minutes or more, even more so for the closer) are almost symphonic in their dense wall of sound, with energetic breakbeats woven into the dense sound. Imagine the vibe of modern brooding slowcore / indie-pop stuff colliding with the shrill acid distortion of The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy and / or some no-fi basement-recorded raw black metal demo - either works as a comparison to how gnarly the fuzz is on this. And the seventeen minute epic "I Can't Say Goodbye" practically glows, opening with those muffled-sounding electronic melodies swirling in a dim haze before another tender guitar arpeggio emerges, the gently plucked notes circling over heavenly keys, everything building into a final ear-scorching raveup, the huge washed-out sound reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine's use of distortion and melody, but with those unique childlike backing vocals, slowing into a breathtaking, almost filmic sonic vista, powerful slow-motion drumming shifting in and out of ferocious full-on blastbeats, everything clipping and distorting more and more until it finally comes apart into strands of exquisite electronic euphoria.

I've never heard anything quite like this. Definitely not black metal, only barely adjacent to aspects of it. Imagine the most soul-stirring 80s film score coated in a thick, sweet downcast dreamy low-fi synth-pop covering and completely drowning in maximal distortion, with the occasional razor-sharp guitar riff or blastbeat or breakbeat buried beneath it. Stunning stuff for those addicted to the sounds of stuff like Alcest, Deafheaven and essentially anything on the Flowing Downward label.

Available on both LP and CD,the latter in digipak limited to two hundred copies.