(2022) Aarktica - We Will Find the Light    


Review:
Jon DeRosa has worn a lot of hats over the years (musical and otherwise), so it wasn’t at all certain after 2019’s return to Aarktica, his long running/most prominent project, generally centered around ambient music, that we’d get a follow-up even as relatively quickly as We Will Find the Light. This new record seems to mark an evolution in the project, or maybe just in DeRosa’s use of it, bringing together several modes he’s worked in before (not always as Aarktica). Whereas Mareación, like most Aarktica albums, found DeRosa bringing in vocals and a bit more song structure only a few times over its 73 minutes, We Will Find the Light (clocking in a little under an hour) devotes a little over half its track list and running time to songs more akin to the gothy, ballad-y folky music he’s put out under his own name and as Pale Horse and Rider. Even DeRosa’s choice of covers here indicate the frame of mind he’s brought to Aarktica since reactivating the name. Whereas 2009’s In Sea ended with a beautifully suspended, droning take on Danzig’s “Am I Demon?” here he covers Portuguese and Peruvian songs that relate to the somatic healing and plant healing practices that he’s been involved in for years now. The originals (all in English) don’t comment as directly on that part of his life but seem to come from a similarly calm, reflective, grounded place, especially the bittersweet “Can’t Say I Missed You.” It’s a song that could be addressing an ex-lover, a distant friend, an estranged family member, or even just a darker part of oneself. That graceful, sweeping gloom is especially prevalent on “Bridge of Fire” and “Delicate Waltz of Shadows,” evoking the work DeRosa has done recently with goth veterans Black Tape for a Blue Girl. The sumptuous strings and rich crooning on “Goodnight,” meanwhile, could and should potentially lead listeners back to his stellar Black Halo LP.   As good as the more “song” songs are here though, and DeRosa has been a strong songwriter in that mode at least since 2002’s “Aura Lee” (from the first time he was on current label Darla), that shouldn’t imply the fully ambient tracks are an afterthought or somehow secondary. The opening “Like Embers” and closing title track use strings along with DeRosa’s mainstay ambient guitar washes to beautiful effect, while the other instrumentals are more purely formless and celestial, stitching the more structured material into a kind of sweeping tapestry. The balance and pacing throughout is perfectly judged, and the result feels stronger than if DeRosa had made a record with just those songs or those atmospheres without as much variation. Sometimes when an artist puts out a record that takes a lot of things they’ve done well before and does them all at once it can feel like a sort of alternate greatest hits (often in a wonderful way). But what DeRosa has done on We Will Find the Light is something subtly different and more difficult; even more so than past albums that have included both ambience and songcraft here he makes them resound as a single unified, overarching work. Not a compilation, then, so much as a capstone. In the process it becomes arguably the first album to point the interested to when seeking an entry point into all the varied things DeRosa has done so well over the years. — dustedmagazine


   


Track List:
01 - Like Embers
02 - Can't Say I've Missed You
03 - Celestial Transmission
04 - Olha o Sol Que Vai Nascendo
05 - Goodnight
06 - A Quiet Place
07 - Bridge of Fire
08 - May It Be So
09 - Delicate Waltz of Shadows
10 - Sirenita Bobinsana
11 - We Will Find the Light


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, chamber pop
Country: Los Angeles, California, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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