Review by Sonny for Fires in the Distance - Air Not Meant for Us (2023)

I felt compelled to check out Air Not Meant for Us after it's opening track, Harbingers, appeared on June's Horde playlist and caught my attention. I'm glad I did too, because it is a release that adds a twist to a well-established metal trope. It is a combination of melodic death metal and death doom, which is not so unusual, but the twist is that the piano plays a prominent and integral part in the album's six tracks, to a degree I haven't had the pleasure of really hearing before. The result of this is that the melodocism is enhanced by the piano's refrains and it also often adds a wistfulness to the tracks with it's showers of gently tinkling notes falling upon the more solid and earthy doomy riffs.

The band prove themselves to be capable songwriters with the tracks being of perfect length to establish themselves and exhibit a degree of progression without falling into self-indulgence and becoming bloated. The riffs are melodic whilst still retaining a reasonable amount of hulking heaviness and there are one or two interesting solos. The vocals are fairly standard death growls and are handled perfectly capably without standing out as anything extra special. As a general comparison they kind of remind me of early My Dying Bride shorn of any of the gothic elements that the Yorkshiremen revelled in.

However, I am not really able to dish out the highest marks to Air Not Meant for Us because of the very things that I name above as being interesting. The melodicism and wistfulness that make it stand out from the crowd also makes the album feel a lot less threatening and ominous than I usually enjoy from the very best doomy death metal and so an upper echelon score is not going to happen. This is still, however, an interesting addition to the genre and is one that I thoroughly enjoyed discovering. It is a good album in it's own right, even if it maybe does fall just a little bit short. As a postscript, it does feature a voiceover sample of Christopher Hitchens, one of the smartest individuals I have ever heard speak, on the track, Idiopathic Despair, reassuringly telling us how death is nothing to fear even as he himself faced it.