Bandcamp Stargo file themselves under stoner and psych, but Violet Skies, the Dortmund band’s fourth album, plays like something else entirely: a dense, modern, heavily produced strain of post-metal that leans on industrial and electronic textures far more than desert fuzz. Shouted vocals trade off against atmospheric clean layers, the guitars are gated into near-synthetic precision, and the whole thing is built for maximum impact. It is an ambitious swing, and the songwriting underneath it is genuinely solid, which makes the production choices all the more frustrating.
The songs know how to move. Almost every track works a real contrast between stripped, near-electronic verses and monumental eruptions, and when the band trust that dynamic instinct the results land. “Don’t Mind” keeps its quiet-to-full swing intact under the compression, “Left For Dead” is the most alive thing here precisely because it drops the gloss for a dry, honest, noise-rock-sludge rawness with a genuinely knurled bass, and the closer “The Great Machine” nails the leap from an intimate, spacious intro into a dusty stoner-grunge wall. Those are the moments where you hear the band Stargo could be.
The problem is everything sitting on top of them. Violet Skies is mastered as a relentless, brickwalled wall of sound, the natural dynamics flattened into a constant, fatiguing RMS level, and the low mids stack up until guitars and bass smear into one undefined slab. The drums read as heavily triggered, the kick a clicky attack with no real body, and worst of all the clean vocals on tracks like “Stargazer” are so pitch-corrected they sit on the mix like a stencil, sealed off from the band behind them. It is a clinical, high-gloss sound that keeps robbing the songs of the grit and space they are clearly written to have.
There is a good record buried in Violet Skies, and the dynamic writing, the heavier swings, the rawer cuts, all point to it. But the production works against the material at almost every turn, sanding off the dirt and squeezing out the air until the impact goes numb. Fans of modern, processed heaviness will find plenty of muscle here; anyone hoping for the organic stoner band the tags promise will keep wishing someone had turned the polish down.
Dense, modern, heavily processed heaviness that reads as post-metal with industrial and electronic textures rather than the stoner/psych the band tags, shouted vocals against atmospheric clean layers, gated near-synthetic guitars. The songwriting has a real dynamic instinct, and the best tracks keep their quiet-loud contrast alive: “Don’t Mind” under the compression, “Left For Dead” dropping the gloss for dry noise-rock-sludge rawness, “The Great Machine” leaping from an intimate intro into a stoner-grunge wall. The production is the persistent problem: a relentless, brickwalled master flattens the dynamics into a fatiguing constant level, the low mids stack up and smear guitars and bass together, the drums read heavily triggered, and the pitch-corrected clean vocals (notably “Stargazer”) sit stencilled and isolated on top. Good songs under a loud, sterile, high-gloss production.
Standout tracks: Left For Dead, The Great Machine, Don’t Mind
