SafeAsHome - Not What Happens 2008
Not What Happens is SafeAsHome's first full-length album. Composed of 11 tracks, it plays like a flow of disconnected memories, a random series of photo slides projected through the distortionary lens of long-lost childhoods or uncertain futures. From raging guitar epics to delicate, fleeting moments of introspective electronics, it is an album of fertile contradictions.
Pop-song structure persistently competes with gritty texture. Soaring melodies are overwhelmed and lost in phases of intense sonic density. Suspended synth and vocal lines are set against grinding riffs and noise, in bittersweet moments of dream versus reality.
Not What Happens is the difficulty in expressing anything more than the Unimportant. It is sudden starts and abrupt endings. It is haunted by the uneasy comfort of nostalgia, and by the frustration with what remains unresolved. It is the derelict spaces of disappointment through expectancy, of loss via pursuit.
The album itself is graced with the stunning, sprawling artwork of Roberto Calbucci, the depth and substance of which mirrors the sound's myriad of layers. Both seem to be questioning the extent to which detail is not what is concealed, but is what draws away from the greater picture, itself hiding in plain sight.
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