Since (Time) - Entropiate

Artist: Since (Time)
Album: Entropiate
Label: Venerate Industries
Year: 2008








Tracklist:
01. Introverse
02. Two Questiones And Three Complaints
03. 3am_1000 thoughts_min
04. Please Light, Clarify Yourself For Me
05. Through That Dark Cloud Came Our Redemption
06. Horizon's Exode


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pass: lateralnoise.blogspot.com

It takes certain bands quite some time to settle, not only in regards to their line-up, but also their sound, and more importantly, their possibilities of making an album. Greece’s Since (Time) started off in 2003, recorded a short demo in 2005, and have finally released a full debut album, which is the subject of this review. Even if I’m glad to say that they’ve made a quality recording, the band’s still got a relatively long road to travel in order to become much more than what they are now.

Entropiate is, in that sense, a jumpstart, a step in a direction which may prove good for both band and listeners. “Introverse” greets us with a dark, delicate ambience that opens up the gates of this self-contained universe and plunges our minds into the passive (as in lack of physical movement) act of experiencing a thoughtful solitude, akin to that of losing oneself at the fringes of consciousness deep at night. “Two Questions and Three Complaints” continues on in this vein -- a vein that sounds like a less explosive version of any of Gifts From Enola’s debut tracks -- crafting a meditative mood which seems, at times, immersed in a kind of decadence; the complaints outnumber the questions, the deconstructive is greater than the constructive even if both could aim for the same things, and we’re burdened into static, cyclic, almost obsessive thinking because of it. “3 AM: 1000 thoughts / min” bursts forward in a very “City Lights Scraped The Sky” style which breaks the cycle, only for it to start anew. The mood remains the same, although the track develops a series of short riffs that in the end don’t do much but change the pace, and not the structure or the form in general.

“Please Light, Clarify Yourself For Me” is like the natural continuation of the last track, with its slightly more dynamic build-up and a sound that actually evokes movement, our thoughts -- at last -- going somewhere and culminating with the anguished, dramatic explosion of “Through That Dark Cloud Came Our Redemption.” This is still our “introverse,” and therefore, there’s no cloud but that which we’ve constructed in our mind: it cracks open and releases a great amount of energy in a heaviness reminiscent of Red Sparowes sans the epic feeling and overpowering distortions, making it sound more “sincere.” “Horizon’s Exode” (“exode” being the catastrophe or conclusion of a play in Greek Drama) finally brings it all down in a violently expressive display of guitar-work that ends with what everything ends: silence. A sixteen minute silence. “Exode” is too, after all, a satirical piece added after the end of a play in Roman Drama. The satire is, I imagine, an overextended silence that however we interpret it is still just the absence of sound: the band is gone and has left us alone to hear it.

As Entropiate stops playing, I’m left with a certain sense of disappointment. The first few minutes of “Horizon’s Exode,” as well as “Introverse,” and some parts of “3 AM” insinuate an emotional evocativeness so far only achieved in post-rock by the aforementioned Gifts From Enola. Unfortunately the effort goes only so far and remains in the realm of insinuation, dragged down by the band’s insistence on an ambient feeling which is not developed well enough and dwells in borderline repetitiveness. The music then sounds almost uninspired; even the heavier parts suffer from not sounding heavy enough, although that is possibly a problem with the album’s production, and not so much the band. The ideas put forward through the song names, which are pretty cool, find only a weak manifestation in the pieces themselves, and lose their strength completely by the time each song ends. “Horizon’s Exode” is the best example of this strength. What do we do with sixteen minutes of pure silence which, albeit a part of the album, are relegated to the very end, when we can expect nothing more and are ready to press the stop button? What do we do with this kind of experiment in an album that isn’t experimental at any given time? Whatever symbolic meaning this exode might have, it just feels out of place. It also feels like an afterthought, in which case it actually honors its name and concept, but even then, it just amounts to a small-time curious addition. Entropiate is, sadly, an average foray into a territory which already has very strong representatives. If Since (Time) wants to compete, they’ll have to push harder, but given the bright moments this album has, I’m sure they’re capable of it. I guess it’s just a matter of time. -by David Murrieta (thesilentballet.com)

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