Fires in the Distance’s sophomore album is one of epic proportions. Grandiosity and curiosity meet the listener in equal measure, and there is a pervading sense of seriousness. This is not an album to throw on for a stroll in the local park. This is an album meant to be absorbed. Air Not Meant For Us is a grand follow-up to Fires in the Distance’s debut.
For starters, this melodic death/doom band from Connecticut took the best parts of their debut, Echoes, and built something even better. Gorgeous melodies are layered over heavy guitar work, top-notch vocals do not sacrifice an ounce of power for their clarity, restrained drums support the guitars but are never stale, and atmospheric elements pull the epic heights even higher. It is difficult to overstate the epic nature of this album. Creating epic death/doom which possesses the heights of this sophomore effort that does not occasionally dip into cheesy territory is not the easiest of tasks, but Fires in the Distance have done it well.
Themes of Air Not Meant For Us focus on mental health and existentialism, a perfect marriage to the battlefield riffs of Yegor Savonin and Kristian Grimaldi. (Burial in the Sky guitarist James Tomedi provides a beautiful solo on the track “Adrift, Beneath the Listless Waves” for an added guitar texture.) Indeed, every new listen to this album exhumes new textures buried in the mix.
“Air Not Meant For Us is a grand follow-up to Fires in the Distance’s debut. ”
The elephant in the room is the hitherto unmentioned piano – an integral part of Fires in the Distance’s sound, but a part that gets rather boring through repeated soloing. Piano in extreme metal is always welcome, but across six lengthy tracks, the piano here rarely strays from soaring syncopated arpeggios. In the first track, its effect is stunningly beautiful. By track six, the piano has faded to the background. Relatedly, another note is the fifty-minute runtime. Although it is not an otherwise notable runtime, the perpetual grandiosity of every song begins to wear thin. Too much of a good thing creates listening fatigue.
Comments aside, this is a beautiful record. Fires in the Distance have crafted a powerful album that is better than the sums of its parts. It is an album with an effect akin to hiking in the mountains in autumn: thirty-mile views and reds and golds and yellows of the leaves that stun the hiker with their grandeur. After a week on the trail, perhaps the colors and horizons lose some of that original impact, but are no less beautiful. Air Not Meant For Us is thoroughly worth the time investment.