Arson Cafe: Sightless Pit - Lockstep Bloodwar Review

Thursday, February 02, 2023

Sightless Pit - Lockstep Bloodwar Review

The crossover of Dylan Walker (Full of Hell) and Lee Buford (The Body) sounds like it was always meant to happen, as both musicians are extremely diverse with multiple collaborations and like-minded experimentation in extreme sound. As Sightless Pit, the project released a debut album Grave of a Dog in 2020, which to me wasn't really a work that stood so steadily on its feet. While the follow-up Lockstep Bloodwar is not really a piece of the same cake, the same uncertainty echoes in its material.

Completely void of guitars, the record contains elements from multiple different musical islands. One can come across trap rap beats, slight trip hop atmospheres, ambient and drone, the element of noise is quite prominent at times and the vocals are mostly comprised of whispers / screams, in middle or slow paced tempos in a rather down tuned and fatigued album. Lockstep Bloodwar also has multiple features almost in every track, musicians lending especially their vocals for the pieces that go more towards its trap rap lines.

While the endeavor is surely ambitious, problems lie in the overall coherence of the release. It feels like Sightless Pit are constantly trying a series of unconventional elements without a clear objective, the tunes wander around the different genres without achieving to evoke any particular feeling, for example it is not as unsettling as a noise album, it's not as soothing as a trip hop release, it's not really post industrial, it's not as tongue in cheek as trap and so on. Lockstep Bloodwar is an attempt to open a way to a new soundscape, but each of its components is actually timid and in the end, suboptimal.

I only enjoyed the album opener, which gives some nice 90's Portishead vibes, and the noise track "Morning of a Thousand Lights" as both musicians are very capable of such compositions. Particularly dreary were "Flower to Tomb" which had me thinking that one needs to listen to some Imperial Triumphant to understand how to record distressing vocals, the self-titled track (what is this?) and the lethargic "False Epiphany". Brittle shrieks and feeble vocals all over, as is the record itself.

DAMAGE: 2/5

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Reckoning

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything.