Why do we consume what we consume? Sometimes it’s just faith, whether it’s a band, a style, or a label. Sometimes it’s all of those at once, which is what prompted me to buy Only The Stars Know Of My Misfortune, the third full-length from anonymous bedroom black metal artist ISLEPTONTHEMOON. Everything sounds great on paper: one-man DSBM artist incorporates shoegaze and slowcore into their sound, gets picked up by Bindrune and is championed by Panopticon’s Austin Lunn, with a mastering job from Sterling Morrison. I wish the results were as good as that summary, because like a lot of music of this nature, and on this label, equal care isn’t paid to each section of the music, with the resulting album having so many solid moments marred by super compression and a lack of dynamics that sadly is far too common for this sub-genre. There are beautiful moments to be had, but man I wish it didn’t kill my ears to find them.

That last sentence was painful to write, because there is definite promise here. Opening with “Safety” you immediately get all the earmarks of solid blackgaze: the dreamy, jangly clean guitars and whispered, feathered vocals awash in heaps of reverbs, but not enough to push away the articulation of the melody, or the lyrics which for one have a bit more heft to them beyond the usual “Im so sad and alone” tripe that mars a lot of this style of music. My issue, and frankly this has been my issue with a lot of blackgaze and even the black metal Bindrune puts out (that includes the last few Panopticon releases barring the excellent and much more dynamic The Rime of Memory) is that once the heavier element comes in, it completely destroys any sense of dynamics and structure of the song. The vocals might as well be missing; everything occupies the same frequency space and it just becomes tinny noise.

You can faintly hear some of those jangly guitars in tracks like “Dimming Light” underneath the roar, and when the tune drops to a half time the drums allow a modicum of space but the compression here is just killing the subtleties that I know ISLEPTONTHEMOON have within them. Especially in the lyric department – I’m really taken with the artist’s voice. “Maybe I Don’t Know It Yet, But Good Things Are Coming” is typically the kind of song title I would mock, but the lyrics, about growing and lamenting the distance kept between two brothers (blood or other, it works either way) over time. It’s by far my favorite song on Only The Stars Know Of My Misfortune, due to the fact you can actually discern the vocals and the melodies on the heavier moments, which echo in my ears the slowcore influence just as much as the soft, jangly moments that often open and close these songs.

At just over a half hour Only The Stars Know Of My Misfortune doesn’t overstay its welcome; other bands would attempt to stretch the songs to a point beyond breaking, but ISLEPTONTHEMOON knows restraint works wonders with this kind of music. Repeated listens also have helped to open the album a bit – I can’t help but note the repetition of the template that genre beats into the dirt, but the process of listening multiple times as I wrote this review certainly helped to glean at least some of the nuances the artist injects. Still, I wish as I fold into the album’s second half that songs like “I Belong To The Void” and “Like Dying” played with form a little more. The relative tameness of closer “Keep Hidden: with its lack of metal leaves me with the comfort I was seeking, but it took some strain to get there.