Brave
Saint Saturn’s sophomore release is possibly its best. While So
Far From Home is an excellent debut and some of the band’s finest songs can
be found on Anti-Meridian, The Light of Things Hoped For is the
most consistently good. There’s a ton of
great songs on it, and it’s a more mature album than So Far From Home musically, lyrically, and thematically.
In
terms of plot, we learn that the U.S.S. Gloria has disappeared behind the dark
side of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.
Cut off from light and radio contact, unable to get out, the crew is
utterly alone. “Alone” is the watchword
for this album. While So Far From Home deals with loneliness, The Light of Things Hoped For is about
being separated from everything you
know, with no light and no help, but, impossibly, still a glimmer of hope. By the end of the album, Mission Control
receives a miraculous transmission from the crew. Compared to the first CD, the story is woven
more into the actual album here. There
are more spoken interludes in the music, some of which are dramatized news
reports and radio transmissions (including the final triumphant message from
the Gloria.)
Additionally,
the story finds its way more explicitly into some of the songs themselves. The dark “Titan” is about a seemingly
insurmountable feeling of despair. The
song has an oppressive, claustrophobic feel, and Reese Roper sings, “I’m afraid
I’ll never see the light.” Emotionally,
this is the nadir of the album, maybe of the entire trilogy, but it’s answered
by “Daylight,” the final track. It
starts out similarly dsolate, with the haunting lyrics, “And the darkness crept
its way, / Like stars we know will die too soon. / There is never any sunrise
here / In the shadows of eclipsing moons.”
However, the song builds to an ecstatic finish with a direct message to
Jesus. Hopeless though things have seemed,
Roper realizes that Christ still held him when he “bled in darkness,” and only
He can bring the daylight that will save him.
Hope is
an important secondary theme of the album, ever-present despite the overarching
melancholy. The first song on the album
is “The Sun Also Rises” – a Hemingway reference, yes, but also an affirmation that,
no matter how dark things get, the morning will come again. “I Fell Away,” a catchy number that riffs on
the story of Icarus, begins with a fall of heaven but ends with a battered soul
and broken wings being mended. Another
song, “Binary,” is a quiet and sad ode to lost love (evidently, Roper had more feelings
to work out.) It has some desperately
sad lyrics, but also one of the most uplifting lines I’ve ever heard: “And in the dark we climb the slope / ‘Cause
the bravest thing of all is always hope.”
Just like courage is boldest when we’re afraid, hope is never more
important than when things seem hopeless.
A few
unrelated songs bear mentioning. “Anastasia”
at first feels starkly out of place on a Brave Saint Saturn album, being a
happy love song, but it’s beautifully sweet.
In the midst of the darkness that pervades the other numbers, Anastasia
is light. The soft elegy “Estrella” is
an unflinching self-reflection, as Roper examines his own faith after seeing
the “true and fierce” belief of a dying friend.
Finally, “Heart Still Beats,” written and sung by band member Dennis
Culp, is another entreaty to reach out to the suffering. I’m most moved by Culp’s description of a
homeless girl; in a line that makes incredible emotional sense, he sings, “Behind
a veil of bleached thin hair, her eyes tell a story, / Like a photo of Berlin,
December 1944.” Culp urges himself as
well as us to step in and give a little comfort in the face of pain and
isolation.
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