Metal Review - "Air Not Meant for Us" by Fires in the Distance

Album Name - Air Not Meant for Us

Band Name - Fires in the Distance

Genre - Melodic Doom/Death Metal

Label - Prosthetic Records 

Release Date - April 28, 2023

Line Up -

  Craig Breitsprecher - vocals, bass

   Jordan Rippe - drums

   Yegor Savonin - guitars, synths

   Kristian Grimaldi - guitars, vocals

Do you like some melody in your doom/death metal? Or music that unearths the melancholy, grief, and sorrow that you have been keeping buried deep within? Or just some truly well crafted soothing aggression packaged in crisp production to cure that nostalgic itch you have been craving? Then stop reading this and listen to this album by 'Fires in the Distance'.

The band creates an almost perfect mixture of the brutality of death metal with guttural vocals and heavy riffs, combining it seamlessly with the soaring and melodic melancholy of emotional doom metal aesthetics. The emotional vocals and dual baseline are complimented by virtuoso lead guitar, piano, synths and machine like drumbeats creating a sense of progressive technicality pervading the album.

The album keeps the music following since the short piano intro of 'Harbingers' and everything seems to work as a whole. The listener gets gripped in the sorrowful emotional onslaught that is unrelenting yet beautiful. The 50 minutes seem to end too quickly that I, as a mesmerized listener, immediately returned to the opener to once again immerse myself in this gloomy atmosphere.

It is really hard to find any standout track in here but the opening 'Harbingers' and 'Crumbling Pillars Of A Tranquil Mind' truly represents the best of what the band has to offer here, while the instrumental track 'Adrift, Beneath the Listless Waves' creates a somewhat break by giving us more straight forward melo-death elegance and a moment of clarity.

Another topic worth mentioning is the poetic lyrics dealing with personal struggles, emotional anguish, and dread of existentialism. Listener like me who often look to the lyrics for some depth and meaning, this was another positive for the album. 

If I had to nitpick, I wish there were some other melodic instruments, some clean vocals and maybe the length could have been made a bit shorter to make this ever more memorable.

Overall Score -

                         8.5 out of 10.

For more info check out the bands official Bandcamp page and their metal-archives page -

https://firesinthedistance.bandcamp.com/

https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Fires_in_the_Distance/3540474086