Shumaun – Shumaun

Approaching Opacity

Shumaun – the debut album from northern Virginia’s Shumaun – does little to belie its nice-guy / nerdy-guy nature. Note the hyper-CGI cover art, featuring an androgynous, semi-transparent figure approaching enlightenment before a duochrome night skyline. Note the band photos that look as if they were taken outside the graduate biosciences lab. Yawn, more booksmart dorks getting hopped up on their own big ideas, right? Actually, this isn’t quite the case. Despite its long-windedness and remove from the sweaty spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, Shumaun’s music exudes such earnestness and good will that it is impossible to hate. Rather, Shumaun is pleasant and unpretentious and level-headed. For the most part, it rises above the out of touch-ness and overindulgence of its subgenre, and emerges all the more refreshing for it.

Shumaun work from several different influences and in turn produce many resulting feels. There are hints of Between the Buried and Me Lite™ (less abrupt changes, less harsh vocals, less calories!) progressive-metal, hard-rockish, hair-metallish balladry along the lines of Journey (or DragonForce, for that matter), tom-drum and affected-vocal brooding in the style of Tool and many other general influences from hard and progressive rock.

All this stuff gets diced up and boiled down a bit, but not all the way. Shumaun clocks in at a whopping 70 minutes, but there are no interminable suites or indulgent jam sessions here (anybody remember Frances the Mute? Yeah, me neither). Surprisingly, Shumaun is more or less an album of songs, and each of these songs has a fairly strong identity. Opener “A New Revolution” has several strongly defined, contrasting parts, “Miracles of Yesterday” and “You and I will Change the World” are nice nostalgia-futurist romps, “The Drop” is progressive and varied (with a cool jazzy break) and “Ambrosia” tends toward a heavier sound. Best of all is “The Dream of the Sleeper,” the album’s 13-minute pièce de résistance, made memorable by the skillful integration of Middle Eastern and Indian influences.

Overall, Shumaun still has the sound of a band still trying to find its sound, mostly by working through their influences. The result in this case ain’t half bad, but ain’t an epiphany either. Without any real heaviness or advanced time changes to pull out of the hat, the compositions must rise to keep the listener’s attention. On that front Shumaun are only about two-thirds of the way there. The album is never truly bad or boring enough to turn off in disgust, but neither is it ever impactful enough to make you stop what you are doing. It’s good accompaniment for reading a science fiction novel, playing a good video game or raking leaves, and you may feel a growing tenderness for these comforting songs, but let’s face it – if you tried to play them for any but your prog-nerdiest friends, they would certainly fidget, and possibly make fun of you.

Where do Shumaun go from here? Will they attempt to refine the progressive impulses that produced “The Drop” and “The Dream of the Sleeper” until they have something approaching the Fragile or Dark Side of the Moon that every progressive rock band should strive for? Will they indulge their budding maximalism, playing at the limit of their chops and building the ostentatious cathedrals of excess that progressive metal fans seem so willing to forgive? Will they continue to craft crowd-pleasers that simultaneously sound like 1985 and 2035? Whatever route Shumaun choose, the only place to go is up – as Shumaun is a solid cornerstone, but lacks the polish required of a true façade.