Music was intended to calm beasts and conquer women’s hearts! Or so did many believed before a bunch of hairy kids revolt and created rock n roll; later taken to the extreme of showing us just how good, brutal, loud and heavy music could be if played by the right people… “The Cataclysm” is nothing like that; I mean brutal or heavy, it is just beautiful and depending on how morbid or EMO you are then you can label it sad or sarcastically happy; to me the latest one is a better description for it.

David Galas is not a name of a band is the name of the artist behind this beautiful piece of music, hard to label but brave enough to give you an idea of the “feelings” and sounds that “The Cataclysm” has in store for you; I would say that Mr. Galas writes, slow, melancholic ballads of post rock, flirting with Goth atmospheres which never take over the general sweet taste given by the guitars and the solid vocal performance of David, small pieces of industrial to present us with an honest and heart felt production forcing us to acknowledge that music is an art form forgotten and prostituted by some, but suffered by many and David is one of those, one of those individuals that worship his own impulse to write music with the only hope that we might just feel what he feels, that we might understand what we already knows or that maybe we could just be brave enough to ask ourselves, what is art? Can music be more than a product sale on your TV screen?

Because my mind is not as open, artistic or wise enough as to invent a genre and then plaster my “wisdom” upon a band or musician (even thou I have tried many, many times before) I would not try further more to describe the sound of David Galas, but I can put together a coherent reference for “The Cataclysm”, at least a coherence reference to me: This album has the beauty that Green Carnation invokes in every tune they print, the secrecy and measured technicality that Agalloch displays and the confusing blend of sadness, obscurity and hope that Orthodox possess. If this mix of bands and characteristics don’t help you much, you can always just listen to the most complete track on the record “September” (The song feature on this review for your pleasure!). even thou this album can never be judge just by listening to one song, or two or three I leave you with a couple of names that stand out the most from this precious material: Far away from nothing, The Cataclysm, Pt. 2, September and Reclamation, all powerful songs that will bewitched you into buying the entire record to discover the universe inside the mind of Mr. Galas.