Bandcamp There are two records inside Under a Black Sun, and you can tell them apart in about four seconds each. One of them has air in it. The other has been squeezed until the drums stopped moving.
Start with the good one, because it is genuinely good. “Dark Tomb Nebula” opens the album with a live-room looseness that Miss Lava have not really committed to before, an undertriggered kit with a snare that carries its own natural reverb, clean guitars with real texture, and, crucially, dynamic jumps between the sparse verses and the instrumental swells that are actually allowed to happen. “I Drown” is the other high point and probably the best song here, carried by a filthy, distorted bass that pushes forward as a lead instrument while the guitars sit back in a warm, fuzzed haze and Johnny Lee sings inside the arrangement rather than on top of it. And “Elara” is the surprise, a wide, almost liturgical piece with drifting modulated guitars, a guest vocal from Alexandra Quintas, and a mix that simply refuses to shout. These three songs are the sound of a band twenty years in who have finally stopped trying to be impressive and started trying to be heavy.
Then there is the other record. “Neon Gods,” “Evil Eye of a Witch” and “Chaos Strain” are all pushed so far into the limiter that the transients are gone: kick drums that thud without landing, cymbals that turn into a hiss in the top end, guitars that lose their edges the moment more than two things happen at once. The songs underneath are perfectly decent stoner metal, mid-forward and mean, but the master has taken the one thing that makes a riff hit, the gap before it, and filled it in. The title track suffers worst, and it is a bad place to suffer, because it should have been the album’s summary statement and instead it is the most fatiguing thing on it.
It does not help that the record is eleven tracks long, bonus cut included, and that the brickwalled ones are stacked early. A listener who stops after four songs will conclude that Miss Lava made a loud, flat, competent album. They made a much better one than that, and buried it in the back half. “Fear in Overdrive” is the closest thing to a reconciliation, wide, high-gain and tight, loud without being crushed, proof that somebody in the chain knew exactly where the line was.
The band’s own framing for the title, according to Lee, is falling under a dark influence and the doubleness of that: for some it is the absence of light, others learn to orbit it. That description fits the album’s making better than he probably intended. This is the heaviest, darkest, most interesting thing Miss Lava have done, with a new drummer who has clearly raised the floor, and about half of it orbits a mastering decision that no amount of good playing can escape. Take the four songs that got away, and they stand with anything in European stoner rock this year. Take the album whole and you get tired before it is over.
A veteran Lisbon stoner band’s fifth album, and it splits cleanly in two by how hard the master was pushed. The tracks that were left alone are the best here: “Dark Tomb Nebula” has a loose, live-room feel, an untriggered kit with a naturally reverberant snare, and dynamic swells that are genuinely allowed to move. “I Drown” rides a filthy, distorted bass as its lead voice through a warm, analog low-mid haze with the clean vocal sitting inside the arrangement instead of on top. “Elara” is wide and almost liturgical, atmospheric modulated guitars and a spacious mix that refuses to shout. Against that, “Neon Gods,” “Evil Eye of a Witch,” “Chaos Strain” and the title track are driven so hard into the limiter that the kick loses its landing, the cymbals hiss and the guitars smear the moment the arrangement thickens. “Fear in Overdrive” shows the middle path, loud and tight without being crushed. Strong, heavy songwriting, undone in stretches by a loudness-chasing master and a tracklist that puts the flattest material first.
Standout tracks: I Drown, Dark Tomb Nebula, Elara
