Album Review: Deathstar Convertible - 'Shadows Smile'.

'Shadows Smile' is the debut album of the one-man electronic/postrock project Deathstar Convertible. Despite featuring guitars, the six instrumentals on this album don't showcase heavy postrock; instead, the artist leans towards a more electronic sound with a prominent use of keyboards. In fact, the songs on the album manage to create a tense atmosphere by mixing many elements of different styles, mostly out of the overall electronic genre. Not relying on the usual 'guitar + reverb' sound that made postrock famous, Deathstar Convertible heads into a much more melodic and faster direction.

Luckily the songs aren't similar to those standard powerful in-your-face tracks many bands and musicians of the electro-postrock scene release nowadays. Of course, it gets loud at times, but here, it is all part of the musical concept which doesn't rely on gimmicks like many others do. The mix of melodies and the atmosphere is what this album is about, not fading away into the ambient side of postrock. The album's opening song 'Parallax' and 'Tricks The Gods Play On Men' show this best.

The last song of the album, the more than ten-minute-long 'Bring All Souls Might', is the album's almost obvious electronic tour de force, speaking of the song's power. It certainly is a great composition, but the album's best song is the fully electronic 'My (New) Little Secret' with great rhythms, a quite catchy melody and fat synthesizers. If the whole album was like this song, Deathstar Convertible would easily outdo the whole dubstep scene without delivering any dubstep at all. Nevertheless Deathstar Convertible's 'Shadows Smile' already has a good quality, being a debut album. Let's see what happens next.

Album review: Deathstar Convertible - 'Shadows Smile' by Wolfgang Merx.

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