eople who suffer from depression often complain about an inability to appreciate the beauty in art or nature. They can understand what other people might find beautiful about, for example, a calm breeze on an early summer evening, or a touching movie or song, but they have trouble actually feeling anything from these supposedly poignant experiences. People who listen to Saule may encounter a similar problem: they can hear what is supposed to be affecting about the music, but they just don’t feel anything.


Of course, here, it is not because of the listener that Saule comes off as unexciting, but rather because of the album’s misdirection. Everything that is “supposed to be here” is; the label’s description of the album mentions its “romantic loops, introspective rhythms, feedback, and vinyl cracks” and you can’t help but feel that these ingredients were chosen for the album because traditionally, they denote “intense” or “emotional” music.


Recently, I heard M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts. This was a mind-blowing experience, mainly for one reason: the album expressed emotion in ways I hadn’t heard come together before, and the result was something far more moving, far more intense, and far more beautiful than your average attempt at emotional resonance.


Saule, on the other hand, is your average attempt at emotional resonance. Lethargic keyboards repeat ad nauseum for several minutes, with subtleties being accentuated as the pieces rise, and it’s all well and good, but it certainly doesn’t strike you as anything exceptional. Generally, there is a climax to the song, wherein the slow-moving, repeating melody is overcome with a swell of feedback, and out of this distortion, a new melody emerges. Again, it’s a nice trick, but it doesn’t have much power.


Music needs to be creative to be inspiring, or, at the least, it needs strong melodies. One could hope that if this album doesn’t possess the former quality, it at least contains the latter. Sadly, though, its melodies are never better (or worse) than decent, and as a result, Saule is entirely uninspiring. It is an album without surprise. It is not a bad album. It contains nothing egregious, and it is not way off the mark. But it fails to draw you in. It fails to engage you and it fails to move you. It will never make you go, “Wow”. In my opinion, there’s something wrong with that.