Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
Related Articles
From our first glimpse of the stinging tonality in “Wade My Way,” it’s obvious that we’re in for something a little more cutting in the new album Dark Matter by Sisteria, but one thing we are not necessarily going to face in this LP is the gloom and doom of this band’s contemporaries. While others are espousing the truths of heavy rock through a condensed form of Sabbath/Stooges fuzz, Sisteria wants to make their own way with songs like this opener, “Hunger,” and the highly cerebral “Om – Yes,” which is a lot more than I’m able to say for their most-buzzed competition around the underground both in the United States and abroad this late summer.
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/sisteriaband
“Hunger” is as close to a legit heavy metal song as you’re going to find on Dark Matter, but this isn’t to say that the psychedelic properties in “Pale in the Darkness” feel underwhelming or less-than as a result – the opposite, actually. There’s something all the more profound about the delicate points in this tracklist, and scarcely is there an instance in songs like “Star Child” or “Pale in the Darkness” where our singer’s tempting drawl isn’t as relevant to the narrative as any amount of intense overdrive is. Lyrics are made emotional through context rather than linguistic direction here, but unless you’re a stickler for poetic reasoning, you’re going to find the fluidity of this music more than sufficient compensation for the lack of conventionality in the storytelling (I know I certainly did).
“Winter Crow” has a nice little swing to it that is rather out of place next to the tempo concepts for “Ramblin Woman” and “Star Child,” and yet it doesn’t feel unnatural at all. While it’s an interesting choice to squeeze between these songs in the tracklist, the look Sisteria has in “Winter Crow” is still organic and very fetching, beckoning us closer with aesthetics all too uncommon among mainstream pop/rock artists at the moment. This is a band that, from what I can tell about them just listening to the music they’re recorded here, needs to push the envelope in order to sound and feel complete, and as a critic, I can’t argue against the boundaries they’re toeing in any part of this LP.
In the monolithic “Reaper” and its successor “Burial Ground,” a faint progressive theme is alluded to in the songwriting, but it doesn’t breed an indulgent conclusion to Dark Matter at all; strangely enough, it brings us full circle to where we first started in “Wade My Way,” which is telling of how invested in the details Sisteria really was in this release. I didn’t know anything about them or their music before I got turned on to this record by a colleague, but if this is giving us a strong depiction of what they can do in an ideal situation, they’re going to have a hard time remaining contained within the insular Oklahoma scene that helped to spawn their work in the first place. I’m ready for more, and after you hear this album, I think you will be, too.
Jennifer Munoz
