The Great Depression - Forever Altered

Danish-based Yanks The Great Depression’s third long player, Forever Altered, is an album of grand intent, not only for its ambitiously polar styles which span across a vista of widescreen instrumentals, spectral prog rock and lush pop surges; but also that it carries a sense of timelessness, of being deeply steeped in history. The choral explosions of They’re Making Us Look Green and Ill Prepared carry considerable weight, but it’s the somnolent pieces which prove most affecting: the beginning of A Pale Light draws out like a wintry dawn on the tundra, finally breaking in a blinding light of crashing brass and sweeping synth, whilst the classical Colliding plays out like Morricone score meets Solzhenitsyn Soviet tragedy. At times their baroque rock comes across as indulgently morose, without the bruised soul to merit it, but in those moments when Forever Altered works, it does so with a solemn, still beauty. [Paul Neeson]