Forgiveness by Blunt Blade engulfs you in a shroud of darkness and lures you deeper with each listen. A seven-song masterpiece by the Minnesota multi-instrumentalist, it is a deft blend of progressive rock, electronic murmurs and orchestral rises to make a sound that is as expansive as it is hauntingly intimate. Diving in, I experienced the tragic stories of the album as a series of confessions, with each song opening a portal into the human predicament and its challenges.
Opener jaggedly intense, the baritone vocals chanting upheaval over the disquieting beats, it establishes an atmosphere of emotional unease that reverberates throughout the album. The next song is intimate in its synths and keeps you in thought, whereas the abstract structures and electronic flairs confuse your anticipation, causing you to listen more attentively. The title song, which takes ten and a half minutes to unfold, is a sprawling epic, one that touches the soul in equal measures of mourning and anger, and then it closes in a dark, melodic coda that suggests but does not promise redemption.
The fact that Blunt Blade, inspired by bands such as Radiohead and Tool, manages to create such dark and moody stories in a very truthful way moves me the most. His baritone, with the echo of Bowie, is raw in his struggle between hopelessness and determination particularly in the minimalist strings of one song or in bilingual track The Journey to Hope/Esperanza. Produced at Abbey Road and mixed and mastered there, the production is an uplift of all the layers and tragedy becomes something incredibly beautiful.
This is not background music this is a call to look inside, to feel the burden of thoughtless actions and powerlessness. Being a self-taught prodigy with a knack of having experienced sonic experimentation in piano to the disco twists, Blunt Blade has created a solid narrative that sticks and makes one want to play it over and over. Forgiveness is a success of emotional intensity and it shows that genre boundaries should be broken. It is already out and it has left me devastated and optimistic.
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