Dream Unending's Tide Turns Eternal

This is a weird one to talk about.

Maybe this is more my fault than any other factor, but I like nearly none of the albums in 2021. "GLOW ON" is great, Low's "HEY WHAT" (lots of all-caps albums, huh) is also terrific, but almost too arty-farty, which is funny coming from me. "Pray For Haiti" is wonderful but it feels too same-y as you get to the album's middle; it's a reminder that a great rapper switches it up twice or three times in a great album. "GLOW ON" is too reserved and polite for hardcore, but ... I'm beginning to think, because of "NEVER ENOUGH", that was the point. (May need to return to this.)

The year was just...eh. No one went hard enough. No one pivoted strong enough. No one peered inside themself deep enough. It was a disappointing year, which may be my fault, as I may have not heard enough of it.

So "Tide Turns Eternal", a metal album by metal band Dream Unending, is an odd spot. In a major way, a winner is defined by their competitors. For example, I can never let 2022 go: "Crest" beating out "The Unraveling of PUPTheBand", "Heaven Come Crashing", and fucking "SOS" says volumes about what I think concerning that album's vision and sound. 2000 is a great story less of what album I chose (it's "Supreme Clientele" at this point) and more what I neglected. When a critic is faced with a great year, they really find out who they are and what they think. "Tide Turns Eternal" has no comparator, so it's hard to figure out what makes it special.

But it fulfills a basic requirement. I have the opening riff of "Adorned in Lies" burned in my mind. When that riff plays in my brain fog for seven seconds, I bring the album up again and listen to it. There's that immediate connection, that I do not have with any other album of 2021.

I think something I appreciate about "Tide Turns Eternal", too, is that none of it feels frivolous. For example, "Entrance" is the 2-minute intro to the album, but it actually has a function in that it introduces the musical and aesthetic themes of the album, rather than ... telling you bluntly what the album is about. (I almost feel like I don't have to show an example because it happens so often in music, and yet I think I have to for people who may not listen as much as I do. So, here you go: Jill Scott returned with "To Whom This May Concern", and her album starts with "Dope Shit". If you like it, that's fine, but from what I understand the track serves little purpose in the overall album and merely exists to give the album some formal "start". In contrast, imagine if the second track, "Be Great", started the album; that's a great, raucous start, that gives the listener a strong idea of the album's musical identity!) You feel as if you are walking into the portal into the dream the band is introducing you to, and at the very end is a little shimmering light before you are plunged into the abyss of "Adorned in Lies".

And this is how it plays in my mind:

Bwuuuuung
Bwuh, bwuh, bwuh wuh wuh, bwuh wuh wuh, bwuh wuh wuh, bwuh wuh wuh bwuhhh bwuhhh bwuhhh, bwuh wuh wuh, bwuh wuh wuh, bwuh wuh wuh bwuhhh bwuhhh bwuhhh,
BWUH WUGH WUGH WUHHHHH BUM BUM BUM BUM BUM

and then Justin DeTore starts snarling and I have no idea how to transcribe that.

I think the most succinct thing I can say is, the opening riff is hypnotic. I'm not someone who is particularly in love with guitar heroes, and yet the first time I heard it - on a Greyhound on the Massachusetts Turnpike - I instantly memorized it. I think it conveys a dream or a nightmare perfectly: the riff is strange - it's ethereal and otherworldly - but it's familiar; the riff is out of time, almost medieval, and yet it is present; and you don't know whether what you're perceiving is good or bad. Derrick Vella, on the guitar, is not depicting the typical sludge or motor-like riffs; the melody has bright spots as well as dark spots. It's literally an invitation to adventure, whereupon Justin DeTore, on drums, makes you descend into the abyss.

I believe part of the appeal of the music is, Dream Unending, if I recall correctly, took some inspiration from The Cure-inflected shoegaze. You can hear some lovely reverb on Vella's guitar; the notes he produces are allowed to bounce off and concatenate with one another. There's a conscious decision to add to the music's "density", as if you're winding through a fog.

And yet after the song's intro, the guitar is temporarily moved aside for DeTore's deliberate drumming, which is more to the beat of military marches rather than metal's typical breakneck pace. This is an album that really takes its time to build up to certain effects; Vella's guitar becomes prominent again around the 3:30 mark, swirling in a psychedelic haze not too different from The Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)".

I guess I should say here, I like metal. I don't fully understand its appeal nor how it acquired its fanbase. I don't scoff at its fans; it's nice to be a fan of things! I think the genres I'm closest to being fanatical to are punk, electronic music and pop, which, I've discovered to my surprise, is not a haphazard confluence of tastes at all (for reference, I once said ABBA's "Mamma Mia" is one of the peaks of western civilization, and I'm still not sure if I'm joking). This is all a tacit way of saying, I may like "Tide Turns Eternal" precisely because it is not metal, and that I don't want the audience to come away from this thinking that I think this is metal nor for non-metal fans to think this is metal. From what I've heard, "Tide Turns Eternal" is like ... it's like jazz fusion. It's like, you can see how Santana derives tonally and technically from Art Blakey, but it's just not jazz; the ideas are borrowed to present totally different ideas to a totally different audience, which some people, for this reason, may call "selling-out" even though it's like ... yeah, musicians sell their music, they by nature have a specific connection to their audience.

So you can look at the relative "heaviness" of "In Cipher I Weep" - the sludginess of the guitar, the dramatic clang of the cymbals - as taking the ideas of metal, along with the whipsaw of the guitar at 0:30 minute mark. Then the full weight of the track comes in at the 0:50 minute mark; DeTore begins grunting, and it feels like the world is ending, with the main riff of the track coming into play. And soon after this, around the 2:00 minute mark, the music enters a psychedelic swirl, as if revealing even that apocalypse was just a dream. The album plays with this theme quite frequently, messing with the audience's perception of when the dream starts and ends. "In Cipher I Weep" never really stays as one thing for too long. The track will peak, and then it will return to "I Want You"-esque navel-gazing; and then, after some prog-rock "Guitar Hero" antics, around the 6:00 minute mark it enters into a pummeling, blaring meltdown.

The only thing I can really say about the remaining tracks is that they're more of the same that had been established by "Adorned in Lies" and "In Cipher I Weep", which is a weak point. The most salient thing about "The Needful" is that grunge-y guitar at the 1:30 mark. "Dream Unending" has a nice Black Sabbath-esque "chugging" riff, and then it becomes dreamy and meditative in the middle as Justin DeTore (or Richard Poe, who is credited as "Additional Vocals"), in his best wizard voice, bespeaks:

There was a bed of roses on the ocean floor, hazy, and pink, from the salt in my eyes, of violet that once radiated violent(?). I stretched my hands to the ???, the ground swelled, and the stars broke ???. It was then the spirit came in, tall and ???, hunched and broken.

Alright, I'm not going to transcribe all of it, you get it; but at the end he says the thing, that the dream is unending. It's all so silly. It's kinda awesome too. And what caps the album at the end is the melancholy title track, with vocals from McKenna Rae, where she says the other thing, "when the tide turns eternal."

And so ... yeah, that's it, that's "Tide Turns Eternal". It's two extremely strong tracks followed by a series of good-but-samey tracks. This is what the write-up of a good-but-not-great album looks like. And this is what 2021 looked like for me (except maybe "GLOW ON", I need to think on that one).

And yet, as tentative as I sound, I do love "Tide Turns Eternal" and recommend it. I always like "ideas-heavy" albums; that is what "Tide Turns Eternal" is, and it tries to achieve this with as many tricks in its bag, whether taking cues from shoegaze, from psychedelic rock, from sludge metal, et cetera. And I just like listening to it, which is more than I can say for the other albums of that year.

Yeah.

Well.

At least you know now a little more of what goes on in my thinking process in how I choose these "best of" albums.