A New Record From Bruecken Gives An Atmospheric Approach
- BuzzSlayers
- 1 hour ago
- 4 min read
The new Bruecken album release drops you into this vastly atmospheric set of soundscapes that have the ability to take you away to different places in a very unique sense, by bringing together ambient tones and space along with heavy and edgy tones.
Years That Answer is a record that starts by pulling you into a world that has a beautifully constructed set of textures, driving percussion, building guitar sections, and still with that ambience in its underbelly, all coming together to create something that has a particular kind of flow to it and feels very cinematic.
"Periapsis" starts the record off and delivers all of these things in one shot. It opens the door for the rest of the album perfectly, and once you step into the atmosphere they create, you don't really want to leave.
One of the things I love most about this record is that they're not afraid to get a bit heavy but still never lose sight of the aesthetic that they're going for.
You have bits of heavy riffs in and out of the track, but you still have layers of other clean guitars and this sort of ethereal overtone that becomes the staple or stronghold of the record's base.
The album also consists of little interludes like "Cadence", which is a sort of swirling guitar section that has some space built around it, and these are the kinds of things that let the record feel like it's alive and breathing.
"Dissolving" is one of the tracks that really brings out a shoegaze feel. You have heaviness, gritty electric guitars, trudging riffs, but you also have this massive layer of reverb effect over a lot of the instrumentation, giving it the big sonic presence that it has.
As I mentioned before, it combines some of the heaviness of metal and hard rock with the ambience and vastness of shoegaze, but they have ways of separating those elements on a lot of songs.
His face is on songs like "Chronstatsis", which certainly showcases more of that shoegaze style and approach, aesthetic, and build, while giving you other sections that are peaceful, sort of selling, again, a very cinematic feeling, they feel emotional, and soft.
I think that's really what it is. The combination of soft and hard that really comes together throughout the course of this record's unfolding.
As I mentioned, it's almost like it's alive and breathing, and there's a lot of calm before the storm, along with some great drive and inventive sense of arrangement.
These songs are not arranged as you would expect. They are more like film scores. They have those builds, climatic elements, edgy sections, but still carry with them the aesthetic of having a distant Thunder.
Some of these are like falling through a dream.
The guitar work across this record is absolutely everything. Everyone does an amazing job because the songs come together in very particular ways that are almost like orchestrations. Everything is fully conducted in a sense that lets the songs come across with emotion and feeling.
The guitar work is how the songs display those kinds of emotions. When you have a track that starts off flowing and delicate, distant and ambient, and then all of a sudden you have a heavy riff come in, you expect to explode into this metal track, but it doesn't. It exhales back down to the ambience once again.
I love the way they arrange their stuff. It really showcases how the band pays a lot of attention to not just the tones of their instruments, but how they are being performed and when certain sections are going to come into play to help build intensities when they want them to.
Also, again, these smaller, shorter sort of interludes like "Nightlines" come in and give you these breaths to take between songs. I love these also because they showcase different kinds of guitar work and how they're not afraid to lay on effects that make everything sound wet.
Now, there are some vocals strewn about throughout the record, but they're not really at the forefront. Instead, they are more like whispers or instruments themselves.
Everything here is dynamically balanced, and again, there was a lot of tension paid to how the aesthetic would come across. The mix was definitely an important factor in the final product here, and why it has the impact it does, because everyone understood their mission.
There's a very particular soundscape that they were going for, and it was completely nailed in my opinion.
This was a gracefully performed record, and it felt great to listen to with headphones on.
I would definitely suggest not skipping any songs. I would suggest listening to the full album from start to finish, all in one shot, and with headphones on your head, because then you can really soak in all of these brilliant layers and constructs that they deliver.
Take a deep dive into this one and remember where you heard it first.
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