ALBUM REVIEW: Child Soldier: Creator Of God – Greg Puciato

In the search for freedom, we can often find ourselves prisoners of our own self-inflicted purgatories. It’s a crippling crux creatives can often suffer from inordinately. It’s an Achilles heel an artist hopes to avoid. Having disassembled his long-term genre-pioneering mathcore odyssey THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN in 2017, Greg Puciato has finally broke free of his creative shackles following the nuanced nicheness of his synthwave project THE BLACK QUEEN, to release his debut solo album, Child Soldier: Creator Of God. 

It’s clear from the haunting acoustic strum of opener Heaven Of Stone that this is nothing more than a labour of love from a man who’s felt forced into a particular fit for too many years. At times, it sounds so sure of itself, often when it’s swimming in glimmering synthwave shores or diving deep into bitter coldwave oceans; at times, it sounds so abrasive and offsetting, as if its creator is undergoing an identity crisis in the midst of a creative outpouring. Either way, with Puciato solely at the helm of the entire album, save for the inclusion of his good friends Chris Hornbrook [POISON THE WELL], Chris Pennie [THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN] and Ben Koller [CONVERGE/KILLER BE KILLED] on drums, Child Soldier is a blueprint of all of his thoughts unfolded across 65 minutes of sound.

There are moments where Child Soldier wades through the waters of Greg’s past, picking up where THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN left off on their 2016 finale Dissociation. It’s in these moments that this album is at its weakest, often crumbling under the weight of its predecessors expectation. Fire For Water is as if mathcore made out with the industrial revolution of the nineties, whilst single Roach Hiss is designed to disassemble your guts and rearrange them on the cutting room floor with its unrelenting post-hardcore. It’s here, across these songs, that it begs the question of whether it’s creator is truly finding freedom or simply compartementising the complexities of his own taste in sound. 

When Greg Puciato truly cuts the apron strings of his musical past, Child Soldier sounds like an album ahead of its time, taking traces of avant-garde and experimental realms to bring to life moments of mass appeal alongside poetic streams of consciousness. Temporary Object is as beautiful as it gets, landing somewhere between the synthetic strokes of latter-day THE XX and the shimmering dream-pop of WOLF ALICE whilst Fireflies permeates darkwave dimensions throughout, drifting between the brooding abrasiveness of BOY HARSHER and the pounding pulse of DEPECHE MODE. Elsewhere, Down When I’m Not questions whether TYPE O NEGATIVE would’ve made it as a more experimental 90’s britpop act and A Pair Of Questions twists together all of the above in a synth-pop shiner. This is where Child Soldier: Creator of God succeeds in succumbing to the realms of creative freedom. 

Understandably so, on an album running over an hour long and across fifteen tracks, it’s bound to get a bit bogged down by the banality of overindulgence, which Child Soldier has its fair share of. You Know I Do has all of the potential of being a minimalist masterpiece, but is blown out of proportion by straying a few too many minutes over what’s necessary, breathing too much into unchartered space. Through The Walls is a little like an off-kilter attempt at BUSH that feels a little disparate to everything else here. In his search for freedom, did Greg Puciato forget to find his way to quality control?

One area where Puciato truly shines on Child Soldier is within the lyrical labyrinthes he paints. Throughout the album, the poetic pitter-patter of his pen treads through the tried-and-tested themes of life, love and loss, often fixating on them through the lens of religious terminology. It is here, in these tomes, that the creative freedom he’s fighting for finds itself. It’s also, often, the subconscious subject matter, most evident in Temporary Object: “I never wanted to leave but now it feels like I’m coming home I‘ve never felt so free but we’re temporary.” Elsewhere, the grandiosity of his designs are eclipsed only by the sheer sentiment of the lines in which he wallows, with Fireflies leaving you simmering in beauty: “the summer runs cold and the daylight dies and autumn shines through filled with fireflies.”

If Greg Puciato has at any point felt indebted to his previous creative outlets or imprisoned by creative purgatory, Child Soldier: Creator Of God is the proof in the pudding that it’s entirely possible to not only break free of those barriers, but to craft something living and breathing that dares to eclipse what’s come before it.

Rating: 8/10

Child Soldier: Creator Of God is out now via Federal Prisoner.