Blue Heron – Everything Fades
Blues Funeral Recordings – 2024
Rock, Stoner, Desert, Metal
Rated: *****
As we inch closer to the deadline for YOUR lists for the Stoner HiVe Top 20 Countdown of 2024. Namely, before Saturday December 14th, 8.00 CET. We decided to deep dive into that folder full of albums we desperately had wanted to mention this year. We wrote about something like 250 albums and EP’s this year. But in that folder, there are still some 400 more that we had wanted to bring into your peripheral vision. And we are saddened that we will never get to that… But well, besides trying to keep up with all the new ones coming out, we’re now trying to bring into the spotlight one from every month passed that we unfortunately did not mention during the month they were released.
As you crazies that follow the HiVe know, we tend to mention the small bands, the ones just starting out and the first EP’s. This means we don’t mention a lot of the big albums, the bands that are already on everyone’s turntables, the ones everyone know are amazing. And possibly, due to the fact a lot of people mostly read reviews to confirm what they already know, that confirmation bias thingy, we might have gotten a view or two more if we had written more about those albums. But we don’t really do this for the views, we do it for the love of heavy rock and discovery of the unknown. But well, here comes a big one! For Blue Heron released their Everything Fades album in September, and since the promo arrived in July, we had been swept off our feet by it for quite some time. It’s one big album, an album that needs to be heard from start to finish. The way it builds, trekking up the mountain, and then on top, spreading your arms wide, having the sweet release of fifth stoner and desert rocking anthem Dinosaur before rolling down the mount again. The vocals change color whenever a track or even a section calls for it. And that minute moment, when he sings that line about ‘unswerving and united’ during the title track Everything Fades and for a small second sounds exactly like Lanegan. Simply wonderful. There’s tautness throughout the nine tracks, it pulls you along and only after you finish final one minute seventeen long Flight Of The Heron stoner metal ditty do you realize the journey you have been on. It is a piece in constant motion, and it cultivates your radical attention. Perhaps it does not leave you breathless, for the tonal perfection, the pristine production and the space every instrument is allowed to occupy provides you with oxygen. But it will leave you in awe of its towering soundscape…
(Written by JK)
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