Night Verses -- Lift Your Existence

7/10

It's awesome to have your best friend stay for a weekend, but if they stay for the whole week...
they start to get on your nerves. Proggish/heavyish band, Night Verses, has a drummer who could feasibly play drums for the Milky Way All-Stars. The Milky Way All-Stars are a hypothetical band I am proposing that is composed of the best musicians in the galaxy, and some of those musicians have 10-plus arms. The guitarist sounds like he is conjuring some kind of snake-like blue flame racing around your speakers from the ether. The bassist, it turns out, is actually quite good, himself. The singer can sing and scream and emote and probably do all three while back-flipping from an amplifier. However, by track seven of the fifteen-track, 70-minute Lift Your Existence, I find myself thinking, okay, you guys are gonna leave soon, right? But they don't.
Honestly, if this was a nine track album, I'd give it a nine out of ten. I'm not even saying that the last six songs are bad. A lot of them are really, really awesome. In fact, outside of maybe "Yours," I really like every song here...but together all 15 are just soooo exhausting. I said "just soooo exhausting" because I just got off the phone with my wife. Otherwise, I would have simply said "they are so exhausting." Valley-speak is contagious. Lift Your Existence is exhausting, even though there are a decent amount of songs that slow down the pace: and pretty much all of those songs are awesome, too. "Parasomnia?" Great! "Celestial Fires?" Just listen. It's so good!

Apparently, you can have too much of a good thing, even emotion...once the singer starts titling things as nakedly as "I Don't Want My Loved Ones to Die," maybe it's time to pull the veil back on a little.
As critical as this review seems, I can't find much of a reason not to recommend Lift Your Existence. Too much of a good thing still means you are getting a lot of a good thing. This band can write some awesome songs. Hopefully, for LP 2 (this is their debut) they will learn how to write an awesome album.

2013 Easy Killer
1. Introducing: The Rot Under the Sun 5:33
2. Rage 4:11
3. Time Erases Time 3:30
4. Celestial Fires 4:34
5. Antidepressants 4:44
6. Parasomnia 4:23
7. Pull Back Your Teeth 3:35
8. Whatever Makes You Hate Me 4:40
9. Blind Lighthouse 5:39
10. Yours 4:20
11. Cathexis 4:41
12. Elucidation 4:29
13. Altimeter 4:14
14. I Don't Want My Loved Ones to Die 5:00
15. Phoenix: I.Rising II.Falling 10:12