Band:	Victory Over The Sun
Album:	Dance You Monster To My Soft Song!
Style:	Avantgarde metal, Black metal
Release date:	May 2023

01. Thorn Woos The Wound
02. WHEEL
03. The Gold Of Having Nothing
04. Madeline Becoming Judy
05. Black Heralds

How do you make a genre-jumping avant-garde black metal album sound approachable?

Of course, there's only so much you can do to polish a genre that is meant to sound a bit wrong merely for stepping on some conventions. Even if a lot of the times that stepping over conventions is merely combining two disparate genres. One-woman band Victory Over The Sun however injected elements into their music without it feeling necessarily like they were pulling from a specific other music genre, and the way conventions were stepped went beyond that. If you remember from our review of A Tessitura Of Transfiguration we called it "an impressive, beautiful kind of mess", while the next album, Nowherer, was music that sounded simply wrong. Dance You Monster To My Soft Song!, with its title evoking either some 18th century opera or a midwest emo album, streamlines some of the oddity and messiness of the previous albums in favor of showcasing just how creative Vivian Tylińska's songwriting can be even in a slightly more straight-forward form.

Don't get me wrong, I call this more straight-forward merely by the standards set by Victory Over The Sun themselves. While there are plenty of sections here that could fit in an album that's less weird, a lot of this still casually slaps around sound hopping and intricacies like they were nothing. It's just less clearly inspired by Liturgy and more continuing the Kayo Dot influence, while putting the microtonal tunings of albums past on hold to create a sound that's more within grasp. I guess you could call this album a bit poppier too, not just because it's been streamlined but also because some of the sound hopping does bring in some really melodic turns. There's jazz lounges creating breathing rooms a lot of the time, in some of the tracks also helped by guest musicians (that significantly shorten the degree of separation between Victory Over The Sun and Fleet Foxes, Dreamwell, and Full Of Hell), something that manages to also create a slight symphonic edge to the thing.

What works really well here is that, even with the sound detours and the intricacies, when it comes to the black metal, to the shrieks and the blast beats, Victory Over The Sun can deliver great music within the genre's conventions. Just layering the very melodious and intricate riffing on top of it, even if doesn't sound as wrong and messy as previous, still feels bold. And then taking that and detouring into lounges, into synthwave, into post-punk, into funk, into very very noisy black metal, there's a matter of consistency which would feel almost impossible to nail, but Dance You Monster To My Soft Song! somehow manages to make all its detours and layering make sense. There are sections that feel more inaccessible and avant-garde and they transitions into ones that feel rewarding for how accessible they are, creating a very neat dynamic where you don't really know what could come next, and you keep expecting that eventually something will jump the shark, but that just doesn't happen.

The result is an album that balances its eclectic nature with something more directly rewarding without feeling like its compromising any side of its nature, just merely flexing muscle inside and outside the box at the same time.