Bandcamp There is a gap on this EP between what it says it is and what it sounds like, and closing that gap is the whole job in front of this project. Dan Sloan describes From The Petrified Forest as a wholesome expression of woe and wonder, and pitches Born With Gills as instrumental progressive post-metal meeting angular dream pop, moving between heavy passages and lush melodic territory. The heavy passages are here and they are well made. The lush is where it comes apart, because lushness needs air and almost every mix on this record has had the air taken out of it.
“Mouthful of Bones” shows what the record could be. It spends its first fifty seconds on a clean intro with genuine spatial depth, the bass warm and forward and audible as its own instrument, and then breaks into the heavy part without flattening what came before. That transition works. It is also the only place on four tracks where the quiet material is given the same care as the loud material. Everywhere else the pattern reverses: “Bear’s Breath” runs as an almost continuous compressed wall, high-mid forward, with a kit so edited that the cymbals start biting in the fast sections, and “Enskyment” builds beautifully out of an intimate intro and then limits the payoff so hard that the tutti loses the depth the intro promised.
None of which is a knock on the playing, which is the strongest thing here. “Mouthful of Oak” is the best-executed track, a lead guitar carrying the melody through polyrhythmic stabs and ambient layers with a delay-and-reverb tone that genuinely sings, and the note definition holds up at speed in a way that takes real work. Sloan understands the instrumental problem too: on three of these four tracks a different element takes the vocal role, leads on one, a solo voice on another, bright synth leads and orchestral texture on the closer. The writing has ideas. The arrangements move.
The problem is that the production reads as one aesthetic applied to everything, and that aesthetic is modern high-gloss prog: tight gating, a kick whose attack is all click and no body, bass locked so far under it that the instrument never gets a profile of its own, everything mastered loud. Applied to a djent-adjacent track that is a legitimate choice. Applied to a record that promised dream pop and shoegaze, it removes the exact quality those genres are built from. You can hear the ambition through the polish, which is a frustrating way to hear it.
Sixteen minutes across four tracks is a calling card rather than a statement, and as a calling card it does its job: this is somebody who can write and play. The next one needs a mix that trusts a quiet passage to stay quiet.
The recurring characteristic across all four tracks is polish, and it cuts both ways. Note definition is excellent even at high tempo, the stereo staging is wide and orderly, and the melodic lines stay transparent through dense arrangements, all of which takes skill. The cost is organic depth. The kit sounds heavily edited and sample-assisted throughout, with a hard click on the kick that carries it through the mix, and the bass is locked so tightly beneath it that it rarely registers as its own voice. Masters are pushed loud, so the builds arrive with less headroom behind them than their intros set up, most audibly on the closer where an intimate opening gives way to a tutti that has been limited flat. The one exception is the second track, where the clean intro is given real space and a forward, warm bass before the heavy section lands, and it is the most convincing passage on the EP. Cymbals edge toward harshness in the fastest blast sections of the opener.
Standout tracks: Mouthful of Oak, Mouthful of Bones
