It’s often said that music is a transcendent art—that it exceeds the sum of its parts, reaching beyond the mundane circumstances of our day to day. But if we’re being honest, an awful lot of music falls short of that promise. If I’m skimming the radio, there’s very little that might inspire even a shift in my mood, let alone an altered state of consciousness.
But every once in a while I’ll find a record that reminds me just how much power music has. A record that stretches my imagination beyond its usual limits and peels back the corners of the fabric of reality, even for just a moment. And if are once again being honest, a lot of musicians think this is what they’re doing, only to mire themselves in woo-woo pastiche and tired cliches.
In the case of Dream Unending’s sophomore record Song of Salvation though, those traps are avoided, in favor of long-form progressive death-doom metal that transcends not only its genre but its ambitions.