Kylesa - Ultraviolet (2013)

I admit that I was looking forward to see where Kylesa would go with new album Ultraviolet.  Then I listened to the record a couple of times.

Obviously, this is not a record that I'm intimately familiar with.  But then again, it's not like there's a ton of depth to it.  Also, aside from opening track "Exhale", there's not a lot of heaviness or rhythmic intensity to really grab me.

To me, Kylesa's best album was and is Static Tensions.  I won't say too much about it, as I plan to review it in greater depth at some point.  Suffice it to say that it has the strongest set of songs that the band has written, before or since.  But there's one thing about the album that bothered me then and is an indication of how Ultraviolet came to be as it is.  Guitarist/vocalist Phillip Cope, in doing publicity for Static Tensions, noted the band purposefully shortened the songs.  I believe the stated reason was that they would be more direct if they weren't all six minutes long, or some such.  The move worked out, in the short-term.  But almost immediately, problems showed up.

A year later, Kylesa released Spiral Shadow, which most reviewers praised to the heavens.  I was less impressed.  It's difficult to say specifically why it's not as good; the songs just aren't there, plus there are some melodic bits that I find to be quite annoying.  What it indicated to me was that the band was moving further away from the sludgy sound they had come up playing. They had shortened the songs from epic-length to what might be considered "radio-friendly" (assuming that any radio station would play anything by the band, which I highly doubt even now) before adding more melody.

So in hindsight, I should have seen Ultraviolet coming a mile away.

After the opener, there are a group of tracks that modulate between a sort of forced aggression and half-hearted attempts at melody.  Neither of these poles sound all that convincing, plus a couple of the songs are less than three minutes long, which leaves precious little time to make a point.  The ideas in these tracks aren't all that compelling, either, which leads one to wonder why they would even bother including them at all.  I don't think that having 11 tracks on an album is necessarily the way to go.  In fact, seven or eight seems to be the sweet spot for most bands.  Of course, it's dependent on song length and sub-genre.  Then again, Kylesa is flirting with not even being metal any more.

"Steady Breakdown" is the last listenable track to me.  Even then, it's not really a good song.  There are hints of a good song in it; if the band had actually used the intro to then transition into something with more energy, it would have been a rousing success.  Instead, it just kinda moves along until it ends, with nothing really interesting happening through its length.

The less said about the last four tracks, the better.  But for the curious, I will note that "Low Tide" and "Vulture's Landing" are easily two of the worst tracks the band has written.  I also find Laura Pleasants' overly sweet-sounding vocals in the back half of the album irritating and confusing.  When I listen to Kylesa, I expect to hear Cope and Pleasants shouting, not singing melodically, and certainly not like what I hear at the back end of Ultraviolet.

I don't want to make more of this than what it is.  And for all I know, there's another album being prepped for release in 2014 that will trump this one completely.  Unless and until that happens, I've got to conclude that this is a misstep.  It's not necessarily disastrous, but another one like this and I can't imagine a response other than "I'm done with them".