Album review: Dayseeker – Creature In The Black Night

Despite being a band on everyone’s lips, Dayseeker’s fans and detractors alike agree on the Orange County quartet’s weakness. And that is, for all of their undeniable talent, their sleek sound, and Rory Rodriguez’ sublime vocals, they’re yet to release a record that’s truly reflective of their capabilities. Until now, that is.

Creature In The Black Night is a smart release. Dayseeker have always had a vampiric aesthetic and written haunting music, though the darkness at its heart has traditionally unfurled itself stealthily – so much so that there’s something rather perverse about the fact their songs, as fans frequently like telling Rory, soundtrack their intimate dalliances. This time around, however, they wear their gloomy robes more overtly. And robes is the right word because, as illustrated by the album’s cover art, the hooded spectre of death is a recurring character here.

In conceptually framing Rory’s anxieties and travails as the stuff of horror movie tropes, Creature In The Black Night brings a freshness to themes Dayseeker have tackled on previous releases, while achieving a cohesion that’s so far eluded their records.

A life given over to depression is therefore portrayed as a dance with the devil (Pale Moonlight). The Jekyll and Hyde nature of a lover who’s ‘lucid in the daylight’ but a ‘stranger inside your skin’ is the focus of the title-track. And being roused from self-imposed seclusion by someone you think is special, only to be let down by them, is conveyed as a return to the grave on Crawl Back To My Coffin. Creature In The Black Night has a pre-occupation with a world-weariness that makes us feel zombified, of being physically there but spiritually and emotionally absent, and the things that diminish us being like little deaths. Sometimes it’s conveyed subtly – and sometimes it’s via songs called The Living Dead and Cemetery Blues.

Regardless of how thick things are occasionally laid on, in providing this prism through which to express themselves, they play to their strengths. As well as having an incredible voice, Rory began his musical life as a guitar-toting singer-songwriter, so he’s an accomplished storyteller, his ability to convey loss and longing providing a framework to hang the many swells and breakdowns upon.

It all adds up to an intoxicating ride that’s equal parts sugar and pill. Creature In The Black Night is the record Dayseeker have long threatened to make – a creature that’ll envelop you in its cloak and not let you go. Not that you’ll want it to, anyway.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Bad Omens, Holding Absence, Northlane

Creature In The Black Night is released on 24 October via Spinefarm