"Details" by Nyves, Monday, March 29, 2021


I'm not going to go on and on again about how much I admire Ryan Clark's talent. I talked about in January and February. I think I've touched on the talent of former Project 86 guitarist Randy Torres. Torres left Project 86 to work as an engineer with Aaron Sprinkle making legendary Tooth & Nail albums, then went to work as A & R for the label, toured with Anberlin on their New Surrender tour, and finally landed a job with Microsoft, then doing sound design for films and video games. Somewhere between their busy schedules, Ryan Clark and Randy Torres crowdfunded an album and an EP as a new project, unrelated to Demon Hunter, called Nyves. Rather than being heavy on the guitars and screaming lyrics, the project takes on a dark electronic-meets '80s progressive metal sound perfect for a gloomy day like today.

A FIRE OUT OF BREATH. Spring in Korea is both blessed with beautiful flowers and warmer days and cursed with terrible air quality. The 벚꽃 (Cherry blossoms/Sakura) are in full bloom today, but the western winds are the 황사 (Hwangsa, Yellow dust from the Gobi Desert that joined with the industrial pollution of China and South Korea) made the air quality frighteningly bad. Outside you can that the air is thick. On days like this before Corona many people wore masks. The thin air often gives me a headache and one year caused me to be short of breath when exercising. These days it's best to stay inside and run an air filter if you have one.

YOU'RE A LIGHT THROUGH A PINHOLE. When choosing my song today, I listened to both Nyves' projects. I noticed that their 2015 album Anxiety had more positive songs and ended with a positive message on the song "Light." Pressure, however, ends on this song, building on the cliche, "The devil's in the details." The penultimate song "Common Ground" may get its own blog posting this year, as it talks about how polarized the world has become. Some days, weeks, months, and years are covered by the thick clouds of despair. We wonder if the dust will ever lift and what we'll be left with. Will the winds shift, blowing the dust out to sea? This song warns us from seeking a quick solution, one that offers a thread of "light through a pinhole" but hides its "devil in the details." Ultimately, isn't that what a devil does? Takes advantage of weak spots and uses fear to manipulate us? 


https://genius.com/Nyves-details-annotated

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