Shattered Plastic Angels - DBL Review
Some people just can’t edit themselves… Grandeur takes its own paths and voila! you have a mammoth masterpiece, a freaking colossus that takes ages to assimilate. The line between genius and insanity is drawn in water and frankly, Shattered Plastic Angels is an artwork on the brink of insanity. It’s a colossus too huge to consume, a mission impossible to execute!
So what is it all about? The sarcastic answer would be headaches and angst… but that’s only halfway there and mostly just a critic’s view, as this was a living hell to review. In our hands we have a heavily twofold album that could have done as two separate releases.
Half of the release is very dark, versatile music which projects twisted images to your mind. In contrast to many ambient releases, Forgotten Backyard dodges the minimalism and makes a full audio environment with real life ambience, percussions and skull shattering heavy sounds. However, the music is not only breathtaking angstful, there are also moments of sheer beauty that take your breath away in the weak moments in the dead of night.
The second part of the album is a spoken word story, that follows the protagonists venture through memories and events in an abandoned house. Angst is a very strong element throughout the story, but it feels way too underlined. The text is well written and recited which shows great verbal skills. What bothers me the most is that the music and the spoken words don’t support each other enough, instead they eat up the attention span of the listener. When the music is playing you sit waiting where the story will go, but when it does continue you sit and anticipate the coming musical endeavour. I feel the composer might have taken up a way too big task, or then simply should have split up the material into two different releases, like I stated before.
Now the difficult part is to actually rate something like this. I could give it 1/10 just for the fact that listening it through with all thoughts focused was something comparable to climbing the Himalayas, then again there are times and moments when “Shattered Plastic Angels” would have deserved a strong 9/10… This is an album that needs time, stamina, attention… hell, it needs the right time, the right attention! But what is the right time for a behemoth such as this? Is there any?
DATE OF REVIEW
> 170812
AUTHOR
> Kenneth K.
What do you think about the review? Do you share some of the opinions about the length of the album?
ten Backyard is a French one-man industrial dark ambient project. It was born in early 2010, and has released (as official downloads) three demos, two full-length albums and one EP prior to this EP entitled “Waahn.” The EP is meant to introduce the theme of FB’s upcoming full-length album; a theme of returning home, a place with painful and tormenting memories - or a state of death.
