Beneath a Steel Sky – Cleave (Review)

This is the debut album from Scottish post-metal/rock band Beneath a Steel Sky.

The promo blurb recommends the 40-minute Cleave for fans of bands such as Isis, Cult of Luna, Russian Circles, Cave In, and Mogwai, which should give you a good starting point for Beneath a Steel Sky’s material. This is good stuff, and worth your attention.

Beneath a Steel Sky have learned their lessons from the genre greats very well, but importantly have injected enough of their own vision and personality into Cleave to allow it to stand on its own merits. One of the ways this manifests is via an inherent duality in their music. The band mix together post-metal weight with post-rock grace, and while there are plenty of examples of these merging and working together seamlessly across the album, they are also frequently juxtaposed against each other too. This allows one side or the other to gain complete ascendance or dominance over the other for a while, before balance is restored once more. This sounds deliberate to me, allowing the band to use tools from both the post-rock and the post-metal toolboxes to further their musical aims.

Beneath a Steel Sky deliver songs that are focused on doom-drenched mood and feeling, while still benefiting from crushing riffs that demolish all around them. The songs make good use of post-metal’s penchant for bleak heaviness, while also exploring post-rock fragility and resplendent melody. The vocals follow suit, combining rough harsh vocals with bright clean ones.

The songs are well-written, with effective worldbuilding and engaging structuring. The band make sure that the style’s build/release mechanic is exploited well, along with ensuring that the music flows easily from one section to the next.

If you like your music to range from the textured intricacy of post-rock to the blunt apocalyptic heaviness of post-metal, all within an atmospheric framework, then Cleave is an album you’ll want to spend some time with.

Highly recommended.