Icarus the Owl’s latest release ’Love Always, Leviathan’ is everything the album title tells you it is. It is filled with quirky and quaint lyrics, intense and intricate instrumentals, and sweet, pretty vocal melodies. Icarus the Owl pushes pop-punk to a new level on their latest full length, proving that technical instruments, weird time signatures and theatrical vocals only make pop-punk better.
This album is so full of components and pieces of the band’s talent that it’s hard to pick and choose songs that fully represent what is going on. ’Love Always, Leviathan’ has some main aspects that I think encompass the band’s style and are present throughout the album.
<a href=“http://icarustheowl.bandcamp.com/album/love-always-leviathan” data-mce-href=“http://icarustheowl.bandcamp.com/album/love-always-leviathan”>Love Always, Leviathan by Icarus The Owl</a>
One of these aspects is piecing vastly contrasting components of songs together. Slower, sometimes delicate melodies are followed by super intricate guitars with everything in between. You can’t listen to just a snippet of any track on this album and think you know how the song is going to go. ‘Nuclear Towns’ is a great example of this, with heavy, intense guitars and drums that slam up against lead singer Joey Rubenstein’s dramatic, pretty voice and theatrical lyrics. The same goes for ‘Tag! No Bases’ and ‘Peppertree.’
The band also employs strange time signatures in their songs that keep you from getting used to the way a song is progressing. This unexpected aspect of their songs makes each song unique and prevents them from getting stale. Almost every song is an example of this, but ‘Chemicals and Flesh’ puts the time signatures to good use.
There are some moments in this album when things get very dramatic. This works for the band, like in ‘Conversations With Dirt,’ which sets the scene of a dead lover and is dark and morbid in the most up-beat way. This theatrical aspect doesn’t work on ‘What we had was Never Love,’ which starts as a ballad and doesn’t recover from the boring, repetitive chorus that kills an otherwise decent song.
It would make sense that the title track of this album is the song that fully encompasses the entirety of ’Love Always, Leviathan.’ A seven-minute song can be risky for any band, but Icarus the Owl packs every ounce of their talent and vision into the final track. From starting out like a Blink-182 song to ending in a passionate fit of vocals and guitars and flowing in and out of one time signature to another, with thoughtful, sometimes cute lyrics and ever-changing melodies, this track will give you the exact ingredients for Icarus the Owl’s musical focus.
‘Love Always, Leviathan’ is a big album. It’s full of things that don’t make sense but somehow work together. Icarus the Owl have shown what pop-punk can be and may have forged the future for this often overlooked genre.
4/5
‘Love Always, Leviathan’ by Icarus The Owl is out now.
Icarus The Owl links: Official Website|Facebook|Twitter
Words by Jenny Bauer
