"Tales From The Shadowlands is a mesmerizing collection of textural ambient layers that sway into and out of focus, like lost memories slowly reemerging in the far recesses of the brain. It’s quite simply a captivating, surreal, and dystopian gravitational arch worth every minute of your time." - Pietro Da Sacco, Igloo Magazine
"The album's constructions, so dense they verge on impenetrable, are powerfully evocative, and consequently nothing more than the music itself is needed to conjure the image of a decimated landscape clinging to life in the wake of catastrophe of some unidentified kind."
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Textura.org
Tales From The Shadowlands, is the second full-length album by Understated Theory, following 2015's debut "Juxtapparition" (also released on Sparkwood).
With each of the two half behind the project bringing new perspectives from their respective solo-endeavours to the drawing table - Tom Moore (Dead Melodies) and Colin Crighton (
nil.co, Sorrow Floats) -
Understated Theory leaves the vast expanse of treacherous seas (Critical Drift EP and Juxtapparition) to continue their journey across dry land. The desolation blues remains however, as we follow in the footsteps of what might be one of the few survivors roaming a post-apocalyptic wasteland, commonly just referred to as “The Shadowlands”.
“Solomon clambered from under the rubble to the deserted world. An eerie silence consumed the air punctuated only by the lone rattle of a rusted sign hanging from the service station wall and the wisp of a dry breeze shifting dust lazily across the abandoned forecourt. Devoid of life, the dying radio’s soft crackle ebbed to silence as he made his move into the cool dawn in his search for others.
Across the broken earth the skies lade heavy with the portent of impending doom growing with each new ghost town resembling the last like beads strung out on a relic highway of dust and decay. As the dying embers of day melted into the darkness he began to accept that the past was a thing long lost and the future held nothing to find but a pitiful existence scratched out on a barren world....
The rising sun pulled and tore at the morning mist revealing a rust red sediment that clung hungrily to every surface imbuing the senses with wretched dereliction. Heading north through shadowed ravines and burnt out plains; creeping slowly, barely tangible to the senses he felt eyes upon him, prickling his skin, promising hope and twisting illusions in his jaded mind. He peaked a hill and sank to his knees before a vision of yesterday; a flash of green through the red as a cruel reminder snuffed out as the clouds deepened and descended like a solid mass from above. Days, weeks, months passed then a pop and a crackle and his heart lurched; the radio spoke a language of interference but a language still. A glimmer of hope, a thread of something once lost, a connection, an ear and a voice to share in his tales of the shadowlands...”