DESOLATE OASIS — When Dreams Become Reality (review)

DESOLATE OASIS — When Dreams Become Reality album cover Album · 2012 · Atmospheric Black Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
siLLy puPPy
The one-man band DESERT OASIS is the creation of Dimitri "M" Kuzbyt from Boulder Creek, CA near Santa Cruz. This project began in 2010, first with a bunch of individual tracks that were simply uploaded to YouTube but then resulted in a bonafide album titled WHEN DREAMS BECOME REALITY which found a home on the Broken Limbs label. This is one of those mysterious artists with absolutely no other info to be found.

The album is available only digitally on Bandcamp and YouTube and has mostly been a “name your price” release after starting as a mere freebie. The type of music on display here is what’s called blackgaze but not like the traditional Deafhaven (the SF Bay Area has an infinity with this style of music), but rather more like a post-rock type of shoegaze that eschews the black metal altogether as well as dishing out the expected black metal goods.

Like any of the gaze genres, this too is a somewhat of a dreamy drift though a monotonous cyclical loop. The first track “May The Light Rise, May We Never Sleep Again” makes you wonder if this is a black metal album at all sounding more like My Bloody Valentine than Deafhaven, Life, Sadness or Alcest. This changes with the second track “A Sun In The Winter Sky” which features the usual murky black metal guitar and raspy screams from the below the din. While the tempo is midrange, blastbeats also make an appearance. Sounds a bit like a primitive Summoning.

“Ataxia” (In Sleep)” is even stranger as it starts off as a post-rock track with black metal vocals before brining in the guitars and blastbeats but is the most glaring example of how this album puts the atmospheric elements in the forefront while putting the aggressive black metal elements such as the vocals, guitars and blastbeats down in the mix. “Philophobia” and the closing “Stars Aligned, Forever” are really the only tracks that sounds like straight forward black metal, in this case like the sluggish lo-fo rawness of Judas Iscariot.

A rather strange album that sounds completely different from beginning to end but maintains a post-rock sort of continuity and various amounts of black metal. This is an interesting album but is very amateurish and extremely lo-fi. For those who love the DIY approach of the underground world of black metal, this one’s for you but i’m not a huge fan of the blackgaze world and although this is more diverse than the average example from that subgenre, it’s just not extremely compelling either. Not bad at all and it certainly has its charm but ultimately it’s just not great either.
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