Band:	God Is An Astronaut
Album:	Age Of The Fifth Sun
Style:	Post-rock
Release date:	May 17, 2010
Guest review by:	Mindheist

01. Worlds In Collision
02. In The Distance Fading
03. Lost Kingdom
04. Golden Sky
05. Dark Rift
06. Parallel Highway
07. Shining Through
08. Age Of The Fifth Sun
09. Paradise Remains

Let me first begin by saying how profoundly honored I am to be able to review one of Post-Rock's towering thunders' most wicked works. Ireland's God Is An Astronaut, prior to the release of their 2010 full-length, Age Of The Fifth Sun, have already encroached on perfection's silken fleece and spellbound thousands of eardrums around the globe with their exalted 2005 All Is Violent, All Is Bright album. Don't hold your breath for this one, you might get disappointed.

The Irish triplet's music echoes Fen's Epoch's drowsy passages in a way, for it is soaked to boot with atmospheric cloudburst of relaxing interludes, reverb-sodden electronic drums, intricate, serene Gravenhurst-ish guitar plucking and If These Trees Could Talk-ish swirling synthesizing. Eldritch, isn't it?

The aforementioned words should be enough for you to decide whether or not you should get God Is An Astronaut's Age Of The Fifth Sun. Having said that, cloaking the album's clefts and concealing its flaws (or at least what I believe to be flaws), would be unfair for the reader. The opening track, "Worlds In Collision," might throw you off with its heavily distorted chords and lowering synthesized drumming; it might as well pour forth unpleasant smidges of the trendy "nu-metal-ish" molten exordiums. Basically, this is how God Is An Astronaut's fifth album plays out: aloof gloominess draws the crime scene before Hanney's kit blasts off paving the way for the Kansella brothers to charge with loud-distorted guitars and inordinate melodies and then slowly fade away. And that's it, that's pretty much the approach that the band adopted for the entire album. It's like they have taken everything from their past deliveries and combined it into one succinct and undeviating Age Of The Fifth Sun. Is it a bad thing? Well, for the fans it's not but for the band it's a huge blow, it means they have lost a certain degree of innovation and they were coerced to crawl back to their promised land for help: the land that gave them fame in the first place, All Is Violent, All Is Bright.

To me, God Is An Astronaut are gods, having succeeded to drag many metalheads onto their cherished territory by releasing scorchers to connect post-rock to metal, life to death, light to darkness. But their latest album doesn't quite live up to its predecessors, it's still decent though, and definitely soothing. If you're downcast, depressed or simply lost, if you're bored of listening to extreme metal year after year, if you're sick and tired of this rotten world then get this album, turn on your stereo, close your eyes and enjoy 48 minutes of relaxing music ramble away from our societies' sordid judgments. Otherwise, don't get it.