In a way, this album, Eclipse by Peaks of Valleys, captures the turning of night into day. Even though the title of the album promises an eclipse, the album itself goes from being enraptured by darkness with more electronic sounds and the pitter-patter of the snare that gives the impression of a quickening heartbeat or an imagined pace of the moving hands of a clock during the night to a lighter, more acoustic sound that is interspersed with a stream of clinking scales on the keyboards.
“I reach into the black hole and pull out the embryo,” he says on ‘Black Hole,’ exacting the kinds of opposing images that make up the embedded paradox on this album.
The stumbling, staggering, sleepwalking notes that close out ‘Ghosts’ is another example of that kind of representation because the song starts out evenly, with even the awkward, off-kilter notes happening in a consistent sequence of sounds until that very end when he finishes the song with: “you forget / you relive,” which fits the penchant for pedantism of the start of the song and the descent into disarray at the end. When you forget something that has already happened to you, you get to relive it which throws you off of your axis. This cycle repeats like the changing of day into night.
This kind of crooked delivery can be seen on the very first song, as well. The acoustic guitar is taking its sweet time in the background while the synth pad thrashes about as a “spotless mind” is being rhapsodized and the “future of the past” is being remembered.
The one song that sounds the most alienating is ‘Labyrinthine.’ It starts out with lightning-quick beats and drizzles of autotuned vocals before it melts into a sparse piano melody, and the autotune is done away with. Then you are taken aback as the autotune and the rat-race beat come back and go away and come back and go away.
Even the cover of the album complements this throughline of oppositions co-existing as it is six gashes of light, as if the light has been clawed into a pitch-black background.
‘Sliver of Eyes’ is by far the most pivotal song on the album. “I saw you in my sliver of eyes,” he has become the eclipse. “Just a glimpse…,” he says, as if he can only see through the sliver of light that is open to the world in an eclipse. It is like the eclipse has pervaded his senses, and he now presides in the eclipse. “Who’s the one you are known by,” he asks on ‘Known By,’ which is a question you will end up asking yourself this far into the album as you have been bombarded with paradoxes, and you find it impossible to feel like you can only be yourself without some kind of opposite self.
But then the album is over, as it is only eight tracks long. And you are left with the rest of the day. Will you reach into the black hole to pull out the embryo, or will you only look at the world through your sliver of eyes? Will you widen the light peeking through the eclipse, or will you agree to live inside of its dark parts?
“Climb up / Climb out / […] We will get you through…” (‘Sundial’)
The answer Peaks of Valleys is looking for seems pretty clear.
Written by Leo August
