This article was first written for the music news and review website New Beats Media in October 2011. It was the first piece I wrote for this website, and the first time I'd written a full length review.
The original publication can be found here.
The original publication can be found here.
After a five year hiatus, Irish band Saso, known best to some as “those guys from the Coors Light advert*”return to their dark musical roots with their fourth album Exitudes.
A slow, languishing album, it never reaches the particular heights that would highlight any one song as a potential single, instead weaving between styles to present an album that is vaguely haunting and supremely powerful.
The first song, Billion Hands is an eerie piano-based hymn featuring echo-y, subdued vocals over a steady drum beat and a muffled, repetitive piano pattern. Its full, mysterious sound trickles nicely in to the next song on the track — the surreal waltz that is Carousel. At only 2:14 this is one of the shorter tracks on the album, but is no less powerful. The long, high notes the vocals lounge upon are comparable to that of Muse singer Matt Bellamy, only without being washed out by pseudo-techno guitar riffs and a self-aggrandising attitude. One of the best songs on the album, this track really does conjure up images of an old battered carousel, broken and weathered but forever turning in some nightmarish, deserted, Terry Gilliam–esque fairground.
The tone turns up a little as we move on to the third track, as the acoustic guitars come out and the drums take on a more rhythmic feel. It’s here that you realise this is a band not content with a single sound, and we settle in to some more traditional indie fare, first with the acoustic funk of From Limbo and then the dark tones of Secret Ministry. That’s not to say that these songs are to be held to a lower standard than the others on the album — each contains the kind of dark lyricism rarely found in contemporary music — more that these may be more accessible to some who perhaps haven’t been exposed to this style of music before, and don’t have time to listen to the whole album.
We get a break in the middle of the album with the instrumental piece Silent Earth. In keeping with the tone of the album thus far, the piece begins very slowly, introducing each instrument gradually and building on some of the hooks developed in the previous songs. Though it does a nice job of ending the first part of the album and bringing in the second half, some may find it a little unnecessary and choose to skip over it. If there’s a weak link in this album it’s Silent Earth.
The second half of the album builds the tone up some more, starting with the acoustic ballad Idle Spirit that crashes in to life with a nice crescendo two thirds in to the song. By this point the band have taken you a thousand miles from where we started with Billion Hands, without you even noticing you were going anywhere.
Tracks like Man Overboard and Facts are the high point of this album — sounding a little like some of the quieter songs by bands like Incubus and Red Hot Chilli Peppers, but still keeping the calm, Jeff Buckley style vocals that make this band stand out.
When we reach Cardboard Cutout we go back to the kind of slow, surreal hymn that the album began with, and the haunting sound continues in to the penultimate song Sooner Or Later — a repetitive, almost threatening track built on minor chords and echo-y vocals that builds to a powerful ending.
Saso don’t leave us there though. The album ends on another instrumental track, Pull The Plug, a confident, sad piece with a simple structure that wouldn’t be out of place on a film score, sounding vaguely reminiscent of Hans Zimmer’s final piece for Inception. It’s a steady, strong song that never tries to build to an obvious end point, leaving you wanting more from this truly excellent album.
What Saso have done here is something that is often unheard in the days of downloads. They have created an album that is actually more than the sum of its parts. Each song has its own merits and style, and most — if not all — are wonderful on their own. But for the full Saso experience this is an album that has to be listened to in totality, in a dark room, in one sitting. And it’s an album that has to be listened to again and again.