Heaven is something really amazing created by Chaidura. The track doesn't ease you in. It challenges.The new single of the London artist makes him leave the ethereal shimmer of Temple Paradise and enter something more base, claustrophobic. Where that earlier piece would have been reprieve in the spiritual, Heaven succeeds in being uncomfortable--the discomfort that is the result of gazing too long into the mirror and not knowing what you are gazing at. It is all about love to oneself, all right but the dishevelled hard kind. The sort that requires before it is accepted a surrender.
Chaidura switches between lyrical gentleness and a complete metal scream with no prior notice. This isn't affectation. It's necessary. This volatility is reflected in instrumentation: thunderous guitars are colliding with moments of bare-boned intimacy and the resulting sound-space is unstable, purposefully so. Emo imparts brutality to visual kei. The GazettE theatric darkness was shot through with emotional warfare of Black Veil Brides.
The sonic aggression is not the only thing that makes Heaven alluring. It is the confession that runs through it: that there is nothing like being in control, that comparison has its stasis, that growth usually appears stagnant until it does not. Chaidura is not proposing solutions. He is recording the ambivalent condition of self-between the state of discomfort that precedes change.
The leans of the production are pushed towards the chaos. There is urgency hemorrhaging at every level. It should not be; this fuss of goth, metal and emo heart-on-sleeve. But it does. Due to the fact that Chaidura is aware that vulnerability is not the opposite of aggression. They're twins. "Heaven" isn't easy listening. It's not meant to be. It is a mirror you are holding at the most inopportune time and it is all that you have been trying to keep a blind eye to. And that makes it a necessity somehow.
