🅑🅐🅒🅚 🅣🅞 🅗🅞🅜🅔🅟🅐🅖🅔

Drumming its way into your soul the opening to Through The Endless Dream Of Time is laden with interesting percussive elements teasing your ears, while melancholy melodies dance about. The track builds and builds to a beautifully sad and pensive finale, calibrating your spirits in line with the feel of the album

 

Beyond The Path Of Your Though is a peaceful calm that entices you to take a moment to breathe and take in your surroundings, recognise your feelings, your situations. Your heart fills with a euphoric sadness in the build up to the finish.

 

You Find A Way To Lose Yourself feels like  an apt mantra and description of the album so far, the track features beautifully crafted percussion, xylophone and entrancing side-chained chords whirl. Gated tremolos lay under glistening guitars that feel like apparitions revealing themselves. Half way through you’re treated to an upbeat, pulsing display of gorgeous tune smithery. The songwriting on display here is second to none. 

 

As we make our way into On The Highway Of Your Life the album continues to maintain an upbeat feel. However, SALVATION really gets down to business here. The cool baseline and sexually evocative beats evolve through the track. There’s also an ear- pleasing array of plucky instrumentation to be soaked up. This is prime night drive anthem material.

 

'I Want To Dream You Again' drifts up and haunting bells sound. Enlia serenades you with soothing, deep and resonating tones. Introspect joins for a double attackas we move in to the perfectly catchy punctuated by glassy synths. If you look just beneath the surface the whole song is haunted with a subtle darkness that you can’t quite put your finger on, but it feels great. 

 

Under The Glass Of Your Soul see’s the return of the ambience ticking. It invokes a feeling of anxiety that lives beneath the whole album, almost fuelling the despairing and depressing vibes. This track is host to musically surreal experimentation with Introspect and Girouette joining the fray. This track is cinematic, ominous, foreboding and extremely atmospheric. Bravo.

 

Closing out the album Beyond The Echo Of This World creeps into your mind. This track is musically sound and practically perfect production wise. However, I’d rather talk about how it makes me feel and ultimately how it may make you feel. The track is steeped with connotations of emotional exhaustion. This feels like a musical representation of giving in to your demons. Walking toward the light and passing through to the other side leaving this cruel world behind you. At the very last point, you’ve realised that you walked toward’s the darkness and entered a world of suffering. 

 

 

To conclude, The album starts off almost making you feel like you’re running in a dream, chasing something just out of reach. It goes beyond melancholic into an unsettlingly realistic sense of depression and despair. 

 

Some of the tracks are on the longer side with two almost reaching the 7 minute mark which gives SALVATION the chance to open up showcasing his ability to write deep, engaging and sophisticated tracks. While extremely well produced the album also features a great selection of collaborations elevating the experience to another level. Especially in the penultimate track ‘Under The Glass of Your Soul’.

 

If you’re one concerned with the current unspoken debates regarding the over-saturation and future of synthwave in general, as a remedy I’d simply tell you to listen to this album. It throws out the clichés of the genre and is a spiralling journey of the mind falling into the depths of your own personal extremes. SALVATION has created a melodic, melancholy and at times scary monument of music. To add to this he’s also concocted a fearful sense of darkness that not even the most seasoned of dark synth producers can evoke. jack gregory 9/10