Bitumen – Cleareye Shining

Originally from Hobart, this is the 2nd Album from the now Melbourne-based 4 piece.

While much of Cleareye Shining was conceived before the onset of the pandemic in 2020, Bitumen used the downtime to add to their technical repertoire. The nine songs here were refined and rerecording into more focused and clean studio versions of the pre-covid material.

Mixing elements of mechanical instrumentation, layered vocals, as well as breakbeat-inspired percussion, Cleareye Shining takes a more electronic focus in comparison to their 2018 debut Discipline Reaction.

And the result is a a wild combination of synths, guitars as piano driven proto-house and industrial sonics roll this this mesmerising album up to dramatic heights. Lyrically both confrontational and introspective, this is a powerful one from start to finish.

This album is also part of the incredible recent output from Heavy Machinery Records, a record label funded and run by the City of Melbourne to highlight and release the music of some of that cities incredible emerging and established talent (and perhaps something we could dream of for Sydney).

 

Out Now on Heavy Machinery Records