A Winged Victory For The Sullen consists of modern classical pianist Dustin O'Halloran and Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltzie. Considering O'Halloran's minimalist and highly atmospheric piano works throughout the past decade, reminiscent of both Glass and Chopin, and Wiltzie's influential work with Stars of the Lid, one of the premiere ambient groups of the modern era, A Winged Victory For The Sullen is with abiding evidence, an ambient supergroup. Both use the fabric of ambience through respected passages; O'Halloran as a raw and sentimental statement of conflicting emotions, and Wiltzie through deeply-laced textures of haunting and nostalgically tuned bliss, as subtleties sway ever so slightly over dream encompassed worlds.
On their collaborative debut, O'Halloran and Wiltzie take those aforementioned ideas and mold them into a classical score of wide-eyed pastoral rapture and subtly passionate euphoria. The album opens accordingly with "We Played Some Open Chords", as an ethereal orchestration conducts a deep, eternal drone, before being swept away by O'Halloran's beautiful piano remedy. These songs often times resonate film score's of sweeping melodrama, tasteful romance, and childlike sentimentality. The two part "Requiem for the Static King" nourishes a heartbreaking drone of classical orchestration, scoring what could be the reflections of a middle-aged life-in-crisis, overcome by memories of the past. On arguably the album's most atmospheric moment, "Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears", a soft layer of what sounds like a plane gliding through the sky looms in the distance, as lite-piano and string arrangements hover around it, like the thick clouds of an unassuming summer day.
"All Farewells Are Sudden" reads the final track on the album, and it couldn't be a more truthful message. While A Winged Victory For The Sullen is an emotionally dense and somber listen, it doesn't overstay its welcome. It gives itself just enough time to lay out its orchestrated drones, emotive atmosphere, and expansive quality before packing its bags and walking off into a dusk-illuminated horizon, silhouetted in a starry gaze. A Winged Victory For The Sullen gloomily dim the lights and orchestrate a sentimental, angelic, and utterly human response to the world around us, leaving those willing to appreciate its fragile charm and ecstasy in awe and wonderment; because timeless music yields timeless results.
[A Winged Victory For The Sullen Website]
[Buy A Winged Victory For The Sullen from Kranky Records/Erased Tapes]
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