ALBUM REVIEW: Bearer Of Light – Sunczar

There’s something so brutishly pleasing about SUNCZAR. The name itself denotes a sovereign of the stars and the matching imagery, suitably depicted by MontDoom as a gold-clad deity whose son could definitively answer the debate of ‘whose dad could beat up whose’, and just one minuscule peek inside the band’s debut album, Bearer Of Light, uncovers a seismic, sludgy supernova. Hailing from Germany, the quartet’s first full-length trip to the stars transfers some tried and tested numbers from 2020’s breakout EP The Unveiling along with a smattering of brand new ways to shatter the eardrums. The band are now beyond a proof of concept and they’ve clearly wasted no time in putting their best foot forward. Is that foot headed in the right direction? Or is it to stray too close to the very luminous entity they wrap their mythos around?

The thing is, while SUNCZAR hasn’t collapsed into a white dwarf worthy of little note, they haven’t exactly emerged as a red giant either. At the end of Bearer Of Light’s nine-track runtime, you’re left wondering whether more could have been engineered out of the band’s incredibly sturdy foundations; there are points where the LP feels a mere extension on 2020’s testbed EP with punches almost certainly being pulled. For all intents and purposes, The Unveiling was something to shout about. Riffs as dense as neutron stars were wielded as the band’s frontal assault packed with well beyond your five-a-day of distortion – well met by equally ferocious warbles of bass and throat tearing from Krsto Balic, who incidentally sounds exactly like the sort of fella who could chuck a sun at someone. It was a concise and straightforward heaving chunk of sludge, with the odd sprinkling of modern heavy metal in places, and, while it wasn’t the most multi-faceted of projects, it left a huge number of gaps for the band’s clear potential to fill in. 

Sadly the band has decided to leave these gaps unresolved, colouring within the lines of their debut EP with ruthless precision to ensure that this is a direct sequel and nothing more. In a way, this is great news as we’re guaranteed to be battered senseless around the head in the way we’ve grown accustomed to, but, with double the tracks and double the runtime, the beating soon grows tiresome and we finish with a refashioned temple and not much to show for it. 

It seems clear that the band have found themselves a winning formula for a single track and then rinsed and repeated till the photocopier runs dry. It’s a standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge/breakdown chug fest for a good 40-minutes or so, and considering the basslines can only afford to mirror that of the lead, the drums give no real standout moments, and the vocals sit ensconced at the same level of ‘blergh’ throughout, SUNCZAR’s grip of their own crown is a little precarious. 

It’s rather unfortunate, because the quartet does more than enough to make themselves likeable, their moniker and visual elements carrying heaps of charm, and the tracks do serve a good neck workout in their own right, but they simply don’t form a greater whole that you’d expect of an album. Numbers like Bearer Of Light and Apathy Of The Forsaken sport some ballistic riffs and garner more merit by displaying the album’s fantastic production work that squeezes out every bitter crunch and crackle from this thunderous landscape of sound. It just so happens that the album’s knack for repetition waters down SUNCZAR’s solar flare to a sparse collection of smouldering embers desperately gasping for oxygen. 

It’s clear that SUNCZAR have compiled a great setlist, but not a great album. A collection of well-produced songs, a distinct identity behind them and the potential to utilise both to melt faces upon the live stage, but it sadly brings no justification behind dedicated listening from cover to cover. The potential for longer, more complex song structures, instrumentals, grander solos and possibly even sounds from the sun itself, it’s all there and it could push SUNCZAR to something truly otherworldly. Ultimately, the band may have aimed for the stars, but they’ve struggled to leave Earth for now.

Rating: 6/10

Bearer Of Light is set for release on January 21st via Argonauta Records.

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