For years now the sound of modern music, both popular and underground, has careened headlong towards a genre-less future. When music historians look back on the first two decades of the 21st Century they will most likely perceive this period as a watershed moment of creativity and inventiveness. Bay Area multi-instrumentalist and producer, Sean Sullivan, known professionally as Sespool, is not only a product of this moment, but an active and inventive participant.
With the birth of the home recording studio and increasing accessibility for underground artists to place their music on world-spanning platforms via the internet, what we have seen is a grassroots movement, working from the bottom up, towards the death of the genre. Sespool’s ‘Before The Fog Covers Me’, his second album is a tomb marker to that death.
Most of the tracks on ‘Before The Fog Covers Me’ have a synth and drum-programmed base layer, with pop vocals and prog-rock guitar lines seamlessly included, but that is certainly not the only format that Sespool sticks to. The title track of the album begins with synth swells reminiscent of the ‘Stranger Things’ theme, followed by David Gilmouresque guitar lines which are then followed by a smooth pop vocal, followed by a triplet rap cadence, followed by heavy/slowcore guitar progression, etc. It all fits, it all flows, none of it seems out of place. This…is the modern world of music. And Sespool lives comfortably within it.
If one listens closely enough one can find pieces of Pink Floyd, Kanye West, Incubus, Timbaland, and many other influences woven through this album. Dating back to the early 2000s with acts like Limp Bizkit, rap-rock has been clowned on by just about every music writer in just about every way. But the genre has come a long way since those early days, and if the Jay-Z/Linkin Park pairing of that era began the acceptance of the sub-genre then surely Sespool’s latest album is reflective of how far that sub-genre has come.
The album has a listenable quality to it that is not common to the musical territory that it claims. “newsflash” is as much of a pop song as it is anything else, and it is as catchy as any Top 40 song bubbling its way through your radios. “twilight plight” takes it a step further with heavy-metal guitar lines and a creepy piano line reminiscent of your favorite/least favorite 80’s horror movie. The vocals on “twilight plight” float on top of and inside of these intertwining guitar and piano lines. Each song on the album highlights a different style of Sespool’s musical influences, and yet the album as a whole maintains a strong cohesiveness throughout.
As difficult a time as 2020 has been for many musicians, especially financially, all creatives have been blessed with months of mostly distraction-free work time. When we collectively look back on this specific moment in music we will be blessed to find how many incredible works were birthed out of the chaos and confusion of this year. One of the albums that we should look forward to looking back on is ‘Before The Fog Covers Me’ by Sespool.
Social media and website Links:
https://www.
https://www.instagram.com/
https://www.twitter.com/_
