It's surprisingly difficult to critically review an album that's entirely instrumental. Without the vocals, none of the songs have any specific meaning or message, which although not essential, does leave a lot more room for interpretation. There is of course plenty that can be deduced just from the general mood or feel of the music, but as there is effectively one less instrument in the band it's important to remember that the sound you hear is made by only three people as opposed to four or more. Even with this in mind however, DEAD EMPIRES have not produced the best album that they could have.

This is mainly due to one issue that persists throughout the whole record, and what makes it so sad is that it's not even to do with the music. The album's general sound quality leaves much to be desired, and every track feels like it's been strangled and reduced to far less than it should have been. Because so much of the band's sound is an experimental mix of tempos, pitches and rhythms, you want to be able to hear every note and beat as clearly as possible, especially with the absence of any spoken lyrics. The fuzziness of the sound prevents this from happening, and leaves you with a washed out version of the music.

Let me clarify: The album is still listenable. Once you get used to the sub-par production you even start to forget it's there at all. But the fact remains that the music should have sounded far better than this. Because the musical quality is impressive here however, I will not allow a technical fault to take up the entire review, and I shall do my best to cover the good parts of this release. Namely, the band's creativity and willingness to experiment with their sound. The lack of focus on vocals means that every other instrument is thrust equally into the spotlight, and must do its best to do something interesting.

While each track is of course unique, they do all follow a similar rule of frequently changing their tempo and pitch to evoke various moods and feelings. The album's length of only six songs (although one of them is 16 minutes long) means that what you mostly get is an uninterrupted, well-flowing album as each song transitions nicely from the last. What this album amounts to is a respectable effort by some technically skilled musicians in creating something imaginative and different, but which suffers from a problem that it should never have had. Many will be able to look past it and appreciate the good music that is clearly here, but an equal amount will be turned off from repeat listens because of it.