Like the Bay Area quartet’s self-titled 2012 debut, there are bare, gold bathed trees on the sleeve, but Louder Studios veteran Tim Green’s production has given Golden Void’s elemental epics a rich new density second time round, sometimes recalling his work with singer-guitarist Isaiah Mitchell’s other band Earthless.
At times it’s as if Mitchell’s crying out from a subterranean abyss where he’s fighting for his life against unknown forces, the bass and weeping guitar drop in I’ve Been Down sounding like the universe planning an interplanetary firefight only he can stop. Massive riffs stack up, Mitchell unleashes West Coast-style psychedelic guitar work, and the album seems bathed in a kind of peyote luminescence, boosted by the spectral keyboard/vocals of Camilla Saufley-Mitchell and bolstered by bassist Aaron Morgan and drummer Justin Pinkerton. Silent Season and Astral Plane freefall through meteor storms of epic melodies and dynamic riff pyramids, while final pair The Beacon and Stormland Feather take the cosmic battle further into the stratosphere before the band disappear into the mist. Golden Void emerge triumphant with this infinite benchmark for US prog.
