As a resident of New York City and Brooklyn, it is far too easy to become complacent as a music fan. Any band with any aspiration is going to come through here at some point, so you just gotta wait for new and great music to come to you. It’s easy sometimes to forget that, in spite of the city’s ever-increasing financial constrictions, there’s still a thriving local scene of young bands looking to make some waves. So it always gives me great pleasure to stumble upon one of those who are putting out great work. Lighteater came to my attention in two completely separate contexts.
The first was during one of my daily Craigslist scroll-throughs (Heavy Blog doesn’t pay the bills, and freelance video production/editing only marginally more). The band were looking for something I couldn’t help with, but I still made a mental note to check them out. Recently, a familiar name started popping up on our Facebook page, and I followed through with that mental note (let this be a lesson and encouragement to all bands to like our content!). As is apparent by the fact that I’m writing this now, it was clearly worth it, as Lighteater are proving to be a very promising instrumental act that should pique the interest of fans of several other bands we’ve hyped up in the past year.
The band’s debut EP, Antique, is a strong and confident set of 4 tracks spanning some of the more traditional sides of post-metal with some lighter touches and unexpected turns. Opener ‘Tailhook’ and following track ’10oz’ are relatively sparse and dreamy tracks whose heavy reverb and mixture of melancholy melody with glimmers of sunniness calls to mind another subject of this column, Sleeping Bear.
There’s a certain edge to these tracks as well though, as the latter half of ’10oz’ knuckles down and gets dirty and ‘Quiver’ oscillates between the two extremes. The mixture of open, expansive sound and chunky riffs at times also calls to mind another Brooklyn act receiving a lot of attention, Sannhet, particularly in closing track (and highlight) ‘Flux’, whose atmospheric lead is contrasted by murky and black-metal inspired fuzz, all culminating in a huge and sweeping climax. There’s an impressive amount of sonic territory that the band covers in the 30 minutes that make up Antique, and it more than deserves repeated listens in the process.
Check out Lighteater on Bandcamp and Facebook, and if you’re in the Brooklyn area, go see them live and support local acts!
-NC