Sunrunner – "Sacred Arts of Navigation": A distinctive album
Sunrunner have created an album with a very distinctive character. "Sacred Arts of Navigation" is an excellent musical sample. "Sacred Arts of Navigation" is a rather distinctive album, with an authentic character that knows no bounds.
By Dimitris (Bari) Polyzois
Sunrunner deliver not just a work full of fresh ideas, vitality and memorable songs, but also a lesson in how there are absolutely no rules in music.
Tracks packed with plenty of different elements
After a short intro, the record opens with the track "Promise of Gold", a song that moves along fairly classic heavy/progressive paths. On this one, Sunrunner also throw in some doom metal touches, keeping the song's '80s sound intact. Third is the track "Faraway Worlds", with Sunrunner writing and delivering an epic doom metal song. The track has a heavy atmosphere that genuinely steps well outside the boundaries, without however breaking the record's flow.
On the fourth track, "Invisible Demons of Ideology" they show a pure heavy metal sound. It leans quite heavily toward N.W.O.B.H.M and possibly carries some Iron Maiden-inspired ideas. In the next one, "Where Is My Home", they step away from metal territory and compose a hard-rock track, straight out of the '80s.
Around these axes the record is built and develops, with its core traits expressed through heavy, doom metal ideas, but with more hard rock roots
And while everything moves along this pattern up through the eighth track, on the ninth, "Last Night In Tulum" Sunrunner go off course. They present a bossa nova song, with latin elements, in a genuinely beautiful and melodic result, one that takes you on a journey and perfectly expresses the song's title. The album closes with the song "Navigating The Apocalypse", which combines various elements from the metal world, ending up with an '80s character, but also influences from Blind Guardian of the era of "Twist In The Myth", ideally rounding off a very, very good record that you need to hear.
