Sadness (USA) - I Want to Be There (2019)^{Release ID: 10915}

Given my newly acquired taste for the niche blackgaze subgenre, I thought it might be time to reassess the very popular “I Want To Be There” album from Mexican-expat & one-man extreme metal producer Sadness who now resides in Illinois, USA. I’m not across all of his extensive back catalogue as he’s extremely prolific but I’ve tended to keep up with all of his major releases & this one (unbelievably something like his seventeenth full-length) is widely regarded as being amongst his best.

I suppose the Deafheaven comparisons were inevitable when you take a look at the pink cover art & it’s hard to imagine that it wasn’t an attempt to tap into the same market when you see the similarities in colour but I actually find the image to be quite attractive & to be a very nice representation of the music which is a common theme with Sadness. A quick look through his artist page will show you that he treats his artwork as an extension of his music & has made somewhat of an artform of it. The only caveat is that you need to let go of your black metal illusions & treat his offerings purely as art which is very much what they are.

“I Want To Be There” is a 40 minute album including just the six (generally pretty lengthy) tracks. Damián Antón Ojeda traverses a few different sounds here but the result comes across as fairly unified regardless, mainly due to the general commitment to dreamy atmospherics regardless of which genre is being explored. The main component is obviously the blackgaze one with fuzzy walls of glistening guitars, crashing cymbals & layers of noise being the order of the day. Damián’s screamed vocals are kept towards the back of the mix which makes them completely indecipherable & they remind the listener of the tortured howls frequently used on depressive black metal releases. The general positivity of the instrumentation never allows the audience to be led into sheer hopelessness though & feels far more palatable to me. The other major element of the Sadness sound is that of post-rock & I find myself reaching for comparisons to Sigur Rós quite regularly during the more epic moments in particular. There’s a greater level of melancholy here than the Icelandic post-rock gods would likely want to muster though & Damián’s moniker would seem to be quite an apt one, despite the uplifting nature of a lot of the material.

There are a couple of very strong tracks included here & they open either side of the record (see “In The Distant Travels” & my personal favourite “I Want To Be There”). I don’t think there’s any surprise that those tend to be the tracks that veer closer to the black metal path with slightly less overtly positive themes. “I Want To Be With You” seems to be clearly the most popular track on the tracklisting & this doesn’t surprise me either as it’s a pure post-rock number that’s completely free of black metal shrieks with a choir of children being used instead. The regular use of extended post-rock sections are outstanding but I struggled with the short ambient noise wall piece “Moments” & also the second half of “You Dance Like The June Sky” which takes me a bit further outside my comfort zone than I’d like. Despite these blemishes, the positives easily out-weigh the negatives & I was pleasantly surprised by how much I got into some of the more whispy, dreamy & almost trancey sections. Damián certainly never goes as far as an artist like Trhä or Mesarthim might have with the uplifting synth-driven stuff, choosing to stay in slightly more introspective territory.

At the end of the day a record like “I Want To Be There” is probably never going to float my boat as much as the more aggressive Deafheaven material or the child-like nostalgia of Alcest but I can’t deny its appeal nonetheless. I may be mellowing in my old age or perhaps I’m simply better able to separate this sort of sound from my beloved black metal scene but Sadness definitely has its place in the extreme metal marketplace alongside artists like Lantlôs & White Ward as it’s a well-composed & executed example of the post-blackgaze sound that may not offer anything drastically different but is polished & professional enough to keep me entertained regardless.