Review | Project: Heavensent - 4940 Days
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” - Leo Tolstoy
So says the famous quote from Tolstoy, but wouldn’t this apply to the house as well? A home is the extension of the people who occupy it- happiness can fill a room with air, arguments can coat the walls like paint. Everyone will eventually breathe life into their home, and the house will grow, react, and change within the personalities and actions of the ones who are there. Most will unfortunately experience losing the sense of home at one point in life, and of course, each unhappy household is unhappy in its own way. When you begin 4940 Days, you get the sense you’re entering a house that had all of the good things: pictures, memories, connection. The things that once made a home can also destroy it.
My Thoughts: Project:Heavensent’s 4940 Days is a moving self-reflection through post-hardcore, emo, and a tinge of nostalgia. Moreso, the music represents the intimate nature of a burdened but hopeful perspective through an adverse life change.
Favorite Tracks: Torch (On), Home (sic), The Last Line (Author Unknown)
For anyone who missed our interview, Project: Heavensent is the moniker of Adam Kluga whose solo career spans a decade of varied musical offerings. This time around, Adam explores the experience of losing a life-spanning relationship with their significant other, and the collapse of the house two people in love once found contentment in. However, the music isn’t stewing in the bad, but rather reflecting on the whole of the experience, including finding love and your sense of place within the feeling, and what happens when that love becomes neglected. It is a lament but also a mature cherishing of the time once had, now impossible to inhabit again.
Entrance
Beginning 4940 Days feels as if you’re walking up the creaky steps to a wooden front porch. You wait by the door until a person appears, and as they rock their hand inward, you are gestured to enter. The chanted vocals that begin the tale of the record are belted as a means of escape over simple prose, exploring the changes in perception when things that were once fully flourished have now come to end. The looping instrumental draped in melancholy is an immediate hook, but the engrossing lyrics keep you listening. There is something about the raw, authentic, yet plainly put lyricism in emo that translates so well into this record. It is shockingly immersive when it works here, and gives way for anyone to connect to the landscape presented in sound on the album.
The music builds upon the work of Project: Heavensent as well, now featuring clean vocals and a mix-match of genres and moods to formulate the feeling. What matters more is the conception and consideration of the music, focusing on a less-is-more creative process aimed at simplicity for more control over the visceral, intimate nature of the record. This approach allows the music to breathe a bit, becoming moody and nostalgic through subtler moments or powerful and disarming when the tension picks up.
While you could boil it down to a pleasantly surprising mix of post-hardcore with a dash of scrappy emo and alternative thrown in, it doesn’t feel like the description. It takes a while to have your influences fall off your sleeve and make something identifiable only in the end result, but I think 4940 Days achieves this. Not because it attempted to do so, however. The reason this album came to be was to explore every personal boundary and let the need to create become the most prominent voice on it.
The album has six tracks, each of them taking shape through the lens of the relationship being discussed. One track can be seen as a conversation with an old lover, while the other details the first date. The music pairs well with each nuance as bigger moments emphasize that infinite growth of euphoria when falling for someone, while more subdued passages detail the hushed whispers and painful silences that occur when two people clash. The album never pushes the pendulum too far in either direction, letting you exist in the space between without it coming undone completely.
What also heightens the record is the way the home exists in the themes and lingers in the lyrics of 4940 Days. Many of us have gone through breakups, but not all have dealt with the physical erasure of a relationship within four walls. What happens when you lose the person and the place that feels like home to you? How do you ever begin again? These questions are answered throughout the record, adding layers and dimension to a topic that some consider played out. I’ll never bash an album centered around a break up, but this offers so much more in the way of discovering your sense of self, your sense of place, and how to move on.
Exit
As you leave the house on its final track, the album also takes a step out back with you as you go. Recorded amongst the surrounding nature and soft-sparking bonfire in the backyard, the last song is the last good-bye. Hopefully it represents the same for Adam; being outside of a house doing more harm than good, being outside of a situation that has drowned your present and clouded your future. Love isn’t “for the birds” in this sense, but perhaps found amongst them, singing in unison. Love is found in the breeze between branches, or in the embers of a smoldering fire. Maybe it is the simple fact that love can be found, leaving hope that it will again.
This is where 4940 Days leaves you. The title is a symbol of the time spent within the relationship, and an infinite unknown left of what’s to come awaits. Project: Heavensent painted such an earnest, moving self-reflection of their experience that eases any listener in. The album is a journey through time but also the varying moods and musical stylings to reinforce the feeling. It is also a thorough exploration of the home one makes, and the ways a house can wilt just like any other living thing. Regardless, this album represents a way out and a way forward. It is best to be searching for love instead of being stuck where it is absent, and it is best to find the right home over living where it will never be. Even if you’ve given 4940 days, there is always tomorrow.
Project: Heavensent
Written by Evan Lurie
