Day of Departure
s/t

The long tunnel signifies the start of the evacuation, when humanity has to flee the planet’s destruction. The visitors are destroying the planet, man can only fight but eventually its demise arrives, and the journey continues to eventually end up in nothingness – surrendering to the infinite. In short that is the story told by the band called Day of Departure, am American band with a cool artwork for their debut album, a thought-provoking look that has me dreaming of an exciting musical journey. And the idea of the destruction of the planet isn’t that far-fetched, but I doubt visitors will be our undoing. We are on a good way of destroying ourselves, so perhaps the logical person should think about evacuation. But the problem with our society is that the rich will buy their places on the evacuation while the rest will be left to die – and the human cycle of stupidity will continue as it is the rich that are responsible for the dying world, the wars, and the conflicts in the world.

They go down the post-rock and progressive rock routes with this album, it is a sound that is dreamy and ethereal in many regards. Kind of a bluish sound. The vocals are female and suit the sound well, but I wouldn’t go so far as describing vocalist Michelle as a great vocalist, but she is almost perfect as the voice of this album. The soundscapes are as I alluded to quite dreamy, and adventurous, a rather fresh sound from the creative perspective. But it sounds a bit underproduced, I would describe it as sounding a little dated, like a cheaper nineties production or something – that doesn’t fit the story at all. I would have liked a more polished and dynamic soundscape, something that sounded 2022 rather than 1996.

I would say that this adventure becomes a bit like Aniara, it ends up floating in the vacuum of space millions of years later and all is forgotten. The adventure eventually still leads to humanity’s demise and that is just as well as the paying survivors would just have ended up seeding the same civilisation built on a few rich exploiting the controllable masses. That is where I end up with this album, it doesn’t really take off to where I was hoping it would go. It is one of those background white noise kind of albums that can go on without distracting you when you need to focus on some tasks that you are doing. It never demands your attention, and eventually it feels like this promised sci-fi adventure is just another one of those Hollywood epics that might look fine but doesn’t really have any content.

It is not the adventure I saw before me when I looked at the cover, it is fine but eventually ends up floating dead in space forgotten for all eternity. It entertains for a while but never takes me where I would have liked to go. Perhaps it is the unlikely story of the destruction, why not a runaway greenhouse effect like on Venus? What if the Earth’s twin is a sign of things to come when the greenhouse effect passes a critical tipping point, that would have been some adventure to write about – this one is just another alien invasion story – but I must say that if they make an animated video to show the adventure along with the music, if they do that well they would have made a creative masterpiece. But as a stand-alone musical album this one feel just like another one of those releases, another addition to the ever-increasing library of indifference.

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