(((O))) Review: The Salt Pale Collective – …and God Said Nothing

With The Salt Pale Collective there is a sense of a national treasure that is still at the hidden gem stage. Its debut album seemed to fly under the radar whilst its songs soared high above its peers for a mix of ambition and scope. Not resting on, nor merely repeating that for a second time is one of the glories of …and God Said Nothing. Throwing post-metal into a darkened pit of doom along with graceful touches of hopelessness has resulted in six tracks of exemplary heavy goodness and an album that will surely have them bursting from the underground.

With post-metal there tends to be an influential band that rings through some of the sounds and the closest for The Salt Pale Collective is The Ocean, especially in some of the varied vocal duality. Through the title track ‘…and God Said Nothing’ as well as ‘Our Pale Madonna’ the excellent clean vocals offer up a melody to the far harsher vocal accompaniment and the balance is incredibly well played out. On ‘Litany For A Dying Sun’ the guitars click into the Aeolian era with some nice mixes of progressive metal and hardcore.

It always feels cheap to use a cliché but in comparison to the debut this is both heavier and more melodic. The mix of vocals was always there but the extremes seem to be amped up. Even the opening track starts more ominously before hitting into a ridiculously heavy moment that bands like Ted Maul created. There is so much atmosphere, a real heft to the guitars and an encompassing darkness throughout that you get dragged down by its weight. It is quite the dramatic effect when both worlds of clean and heavy collide and throughout the band always mix aspects together rather than have one stand aside for the other. It ultimately leads to an incredible listen but also makes it tricky to place this in a genre as so much has gone into the song structures without making them overtly complex. The wild sax playing that graced the debut once again makes an appearance in the second half of the album which gets epic!

The Salt Pale Collective use space as a key in its heaviness, it is never empty but notes are held in both synth and instrumentation to shadow the vocals that play out above it. …and God Said Nothing is an excellent blend of extremes and offers so much to so many different facets of dark and heavy music. It isn’t heavy for the sake of it and nothing feels overworked. This is a well crafted album which sounds deep and rich and it’s with great expectation that this one should be appearing on the end of year lists, it’s tremendous.