Floating – Hesitating Lights Review

Swedish duo Floating is the type of band that really makes you think a lot about viiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiibes, man. Yes, their performances are stout, and yes, they write very strong songs (we’ll get to both of those things), but the first thing most listeners are likely to notice about sophomore effort Hesitating Lights is the particular stylistic mix it brings, and how that creates an overall aura, feel, vibe that just can’t be escaped.

Not that you should want to escape it, because Floating’s combination of death metal with post punk and goth rock is so perfectly integrated and seamless that ears unfamiliar with the separated styles might never think they existed apart in the first place. It helps that the band’s death metal is on the progressive but never capital-T Tech side of things, instead bringing something less brutal and more pliable to this blender (Morbus Chron is a decent comp), but it also helps immensely that nothing about this stylistic marriage feels like a gimmick. Rather, Floating’s sound feels 100 percent natural, as if this is exactly the type of space in which this particular band is supposed to write their songs (because, well, it is).

One of the more interesting tricks Floating pulls off here is exactly how they integrate the two main sides of their sound. Sometimes they intentionally separate them, offering passages of clean, sparse guitar lines straight out of the Joy Division playbook before exploding into sections of Gorgutsy dissonant riffing and (admittedly somewhat restrained) blasts. “Grave Dog,” for example, spends a lot of time imitating a less claustrophobic version of Colored Sands before an outro that could easily work in a Robert Smith love song. But more often those elements are combined, resulting in that oh-so-effective vibe that can’t help but act as the initial hook into this record.

Add in a subtly dynamic vocal performance – emotive and haggard growls and screams with a serious Luc Lemay affinity – and you get an almost deceptively wide range of particular sounds. At different times it might sound like Demilich running face first into Killing Joke, jangly and trippy like early Oranssi Pazuzu (“Exit Bag Song”), doom/deathy like Brave Murder Day-era Katatonia, or a little psychedelic like the aforementioned Morbus Chron. It’s tight but drifty, suspenseful but escapist, and always written with a great sense of flow and tension.

That tension is perhaps the greatest trait that Floating unlocks through their genre blending. Between the high, screaming tremolo lines, jangly punk riffs, bits of throbbing synths, and injections of dissonance, Floating weave some rather wide and tense song arcs despite most of these tunes having very tight run times (only two extend past five minutes in length). There’s a lot going on here despite nothing being particularly cacophonous in the instrumental department, and at just over 35 minutes in length, the album might feel like a bit of a whirlwind at first, especially if you’re spending a lot of time focused on how exactly they’re making Siouxsie and the Banshees vibes mix so well with wacky death metal riffing.

Which is, of course, a testament to the band’s songcraft and overall chemistry as a duo. Hesitating Lights will likely and rightly get a lot of attention for being a pretty impressive blending of two seemingly disparate styles of music – you just read a lot of words stating exactly that – but ultimately and more importantly it’s a very impressive set of songs. Vibes are great, but vibes that hook you only to slowly reveal a bunch of well written and interesting music? That’s the ticket.