Formative Albums 4 - Dust to Dust by Heavenly

[davidn]

On an objective level, Heavenly is an absolute bus crash. They named themselves as an adjective. To date, they haven't been able to hold together a remotely consistent lineup from album to album (they only settled on a consistent logo after their fourth). Singer Ben Sotto pronounces English words in such bizarre and implausible ways that it might as well be Martian. And they're absolutely brilliant.

Heavenly is a band from France that mostly performed in east Asia, although to my disappointment they haven't been active for a while. They also had their roots in Noise Records, with both Piet Sielck and Kai Hansen guesting on their first album before they really started hitting their stride. That stride was very much hit with their third release Dust to Dust, a 70-minute album that tells the story of a vampire seeking to regain his soul by killing his master, and musically features all the harpsichords, organs and church bells that you would expect from that theme. I'm fairly sure it must have been inspired by Ben Sotto just playing loads of Castlevania one night and then recreating the music in metal form.

Their sound has a unique kind of production slant to it that I can't quite identify - it's very bombastic and effects-laden while still having the guitars at the forefront, and Ben's vocal range is unbelievable. But the most standout thing about his songs is the unusual take on structure. Take "Evil", the opening song from this album - it starts off fairly normally as a superfast power metal song, goes through a verse, prechorus, second verse, prechorus... then changes its mind, goes to 6/8 and starts some other verses as a different song before eventually reaching the true chorus. By the time the instrumental comes round the time signature has changed back again, playing some melodies that will be reprised later in the album, then it drops to a quiet slow part, builds up and gradually transforms back to its B-section. Most other bands would write something with a structure like this as a one-off epic - for Heavenly, every song is like this and it's incredible.

Comments

[chalcedony_starlings]

(this is all very interesting to read about even if we're not enough in-scene to have that much context) (yeah!) (yeah!) (OvOvOvOvO)

[davidn]

Haha, thank you :)

[kjorteo]

Heavenly boldly owns their bombastic outrageousness, such that later albums feature cannons and even jet engines as instruments. Trying to listen to any given Heavenly song while reading a printout of the lyrics at the same time for guidance only makes it worse as trying to map the sounds you are hearing to even the most generously lenient pronunciation of the words you are reading is like solving a Myst puzzle. They should be in some kind of Hall of Fame for the absolute dumbest guilty-pleasure bands that are somehow amazing, with the likes of Crush 40 and Twilight Force.

How are you deciding the order in which to post the ten you have chosen, by the way? I'm intrigued by this idea and curious about that part. :)

[davidn]

I’ve definitely been missing Heavenly since their disappearance - their music had such a unique quality to it, and Ben Sotto is probably one of my favourite songwriters, in a bit of a different way from everyone else - the way he puts songs together is just so all over the place and unorthodox, in a way that works incredibly well. My favourite example is Still Believe, which... makes two false starts (and one of those is an Edguy song) before starting in its prechorus, then interrupting it. https://youtu.be/kHYKY5-JSdY

I’m doing these approximately in the order that I first heard them as I go through how my tastes evolved, though I haven’t prepared a list in advance and I’m just writing about them as I think about them. I know the next one will break that pattern :)

[kjorteo]

Nocturnal Rites came back out of nowhere and put out a new album after... maybe a bit of an absence. It is very appropriately titled Phoenix, though it may as well be Ten More Songs You Won't Believe Aren't Just From New World Messiah. So, you never know, I guess!

And ah, that makes sense! Chronlogical order, hmm? Hmm...

Also, I clicked on that link for Still Believe wondering if I'd catch what you were referring two, since you didn't narrow down which of the two false starts and which Edguy song you meant, and then it started and I was like, "Oh."