Into The Daylight: A Brief Review Of The New Album From High Heavens (Ex-Edsel, I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, New Wet Kojak)

The debut full-length from High Heavens, Springtime Don't Call, is going to earn a lot of comparisons to Crime & The City Solution, and even Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. The tunes on this record are emotive (but not emo) rockers that ride sharp melodic twists and turns with the kind of pep one found from any number of Nineties-era D.C.-based bands. That shouldn't be too surprising given that High Heavens drummer Nick Pellicciotto was in Starry Eyes with three members of Velocity Girl, or in New Wet Kojak with a few guys from Girls Against Boys and Grey Matter, or Edsel with Sohrab Habibion (SAVAK). Still, for that D.C. connection what makes High Heavens' music work so well might be the vocals of John Matthew Walker.

"Vermouth on Ice", an early single, finds Walker singing over a churning melody much like Simon Bonney did in the late Eighties, while the title cut here does it one better by sounding remarkably like The Chameleons and The Sound a tiny bit. High Heavens don't lean too heavily on the goth-ier portions of those styles, preferring instead to make this a uniquely American kind of endeavor despite the debts owed to British and Australian pioneers. Guitarist Ernest Salaz (Glorium) lays down guitar-lines that are supple and sinewy, part Bargeld and part Rowland S. Howard (hard to shake those comparison-points, eh?), while the keyboards from Jeremy Erwin adds layers here that take this music into a more modern space on the superb "Skeleton Legs". This one is as simple and brief as some of the other numbers are complex and epic, and I dug the way the band could shift gears like this. "Bugle Serenade 1975" ratchets down the intensity a bit, even as Salaz plucks out a figure that sounds a good deal like the hook from "Silent Hedges". It is one of many cuts here that nods to the past to point the way to some new way to blend these touchstones of post-punk history.

"Don't You Feel The Dying" sounds to me like The Grifters and Johnny Thunders, even as "Into the Daylight" steers things back to a mood that Echo & The Bunnymen would have pursued wholeheartedly in their early years. Both of those numbers, dissimilar as they are, are highlights here on Springtime Don't Call, and each indicates the kind of formidable power that this band brings to things. This is the kind of big music that it would be risky to attempt and fail at, but High Heavens succeed spectacularly here, hitting just the right tone so as not to render this too pretentious, or too loose. Focused, intense, and borderline hypnotic in spots, this debut from High Heavens is one of the first things you should run off and buy on Bandcamp today.

Springtime Don't Call is out today via the link below.

More details on High Heavens via the official Facebook page.

[Photo: Nick Pellioccotto / High Heavens]