Lmst

Tuesday the Sky – Indoor Enthusiast Review

By Baguette of Bodom

Jim Matheos is not the kind of artist to sit still in one place for long. Best known for his splendid guitar work in amorphous US progressive metal band Fates Warning, he also wields a vast assortment of offshoots and side projects, some closer to his usual style than others. Instrumental solo effort Tuesday the Sky is one of Matheos’ more distant adventures with its ambient post-rock soundscapes and touches of electronica. Debut album Drift spawned in 2017 in the wake of Theories of Flight’s writing sessions. Moody 2021 follow-up The Blurred Horizon largely eschewed the more explosive bits, leaving one Huck n Roll with respectful but mixed feelings. Now, four more years later, Matheos is revisiting Tuesday the Sky again with third album Indoor Enthusiast. How enthusiastic should fans of Matheos be for the return of this questionably named project?1

Crafting delicate atmospheres remains Tuesday the Sky’s bread and butter. Taking notes from Sigur Rós and Brian Eno alike, Indoor Enthusiast drifts between moods and genres. On the minimalistic end of the spectrum, dreamy and introspective electronica tracks like “Zugzwang” and “The Last Lonely Lamppost” act as the base sound for the album. Drums and guitars provide additional instrumentation as counterbalance in both accentuating and maximalist ways, occasionally entering familiar metal territory (“The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You,” “Set Fire to the Stars”). While Matheos experimented with things like this alongside Kevin Moore in OSI, the material on Indoor Enthusiast is generally more low-key than OSI’s most somber moments. And sans vocals, the onus is even more on the songwriting to prove the album’s worth.

Indoor Enthusiast takes much better advantage of layers and texture than prior works. Drift kept its loadout of strange but exciting ideas separate, and most of The Blurred Horizon stuck to a quiet, minimalistic gloom. In contrast, Indoor Enthusiast fuses its elements together more often in both subtle and unsubtle ways. This leads to a stronger active experience while still making sense album flow-wise. Improved composition allows some of the quieter material to shine and pop (“Get Lost,” “Between Wind and Water”), and “Does It Need to Be So Loud?” even brings back the electronic alt-rock gloom of Disconnected. Deep build-ups lead to satisfying crescendos, with “Set Fire to the Stars” using the record’s full arsenal to make a case for the strongest Tuesday the Sky song yet. Not all of the record’s quirks land equally well. For instance, some of the glitchier effects used (“The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You,” “Memento Mori”) are distracting and take away from the album’s introspective vibe. But overall, Indoor Enthusiast’s songs have both the variety and quality to be distinct and interesting.

The instrumentation of Tuesday the Sky sounds as crisp as ever, a quality expected of Matheos. The rock instruments sound excellent, accentuating the wide variety of electronic effects at the core of the album. The album’s elements combine naturally and have plenty of room to breathe. Though wonderfully produced, it does feel like there is too much downtime between Indoor Enthusiast’s highlights. Matheos’ greatest strength is undoubtedly his tasteful and subtly complex guitar wizardry, and sometimes the nature of a project like Tuesday the Sky gets in the way of that strength—the back-to-back of twins “Ghost Train” and “Zugzwang” slowing down momentum early on. The second half of the album, fortunately, avoids the “background music” pitfall. While I do feel like the album still leaves something on the table, its strong highlights make the record a pleasant experience front to back.

Though wandering slightly off course at times, Indoor Enthusiast is the most cohesive Tuesday the Sky record yet. Its individual ingredients of rock, metal, and ambient electronic mix together better than before, with memorable dynamic shifts keeping things going. Compared to last year’s North Sea Echoes debut, Matheos has certainly improved the minimalistic experimental side of his songwriting; the album as a whole feels like it develops towards something. I do still think he can do even better, but he is making it work. I don’t know what direction Tuesday the Sky will go to next—if any—but Indoor Enthusiast gives this side of Matheos a fresh and solid foundation.

Rating: Good!
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 256 kbps mp3
Label: Metal Blade Records
Websites: tuesdaythesky.bandcamp.com | tuesdaythesky.com | facebook.com/TuesdaytheSky
Releases Worldwide: October 24th, 2025

#2025 #30 #Ambient #AmericanMetal #BrianEno #Electronica #FatesWarning #IndoorEnthusiast #Instrumental #InstrumentalMetal #MetalBladeRecords #NorthSeaEchoes #Oct25 #OSI #PostRock #ProgressiveMetal #ProgressiveRock #Review #Reviews #SigurRÃS #TuesdayTheSky

North Sea Echoes – Really Good Terrible Things Review

By Dolphin Whisperer

Fewer combos in metal have spurred music in my wheelhouse as that of Ray Alder and Jim Matheos. Their union for Fates Warning’s 1988 release No Exit burst in the budding progressive metal scene with USPM histrionics and Rush-fueled narrative structure. Of course, that was near forty years ago. At sixty vs twenty, your mind (mostly) thinks differently, your voice cracks differently, your hair grays and may even thin. In the case of Alder and Matheos, while immune to the loss of hair, do fall in line to some extent with the other consequences of time. Alder, for his part, has slowly adapted his caterwauling to a lower-register, full-voiced croon, gracing many later era Fates albums with his refined calls, as well as providing some power to important Redemption albums and 2023’s A-Z release. Matheos has foreshadowed his own growing ethereality with the electro-alt-prog of OSI and pet ambient project Tuesday the Sky displaying little of the riff and raucous of his heaviest work. North Sea Echoes, then, naturally follows this gentler path. Do its waves even make a sound worth echoing though?

Maybe you caught the last Fates record or Alder’s follow-up solo release, but even amongst the heavier distortion numbers on those jams, Alder’s performances have tended to his sleepier, softer side. North Sea Echoes, of course, doesn’t sell itself any other way, stirring a current throughout Really Good Terrible Things that’s more of the fizzle of a wave dragged over rocks into a tide pool rather than an open beach crash. In that regard, many of Matheos’ spindly guitar works flitter about like the bright and climbing melodies of a Helios breeze (“Throwing Stones,” “We Move Around the Sun”) with Alder’s warm voice finding the surge in the way synth embellishments could in a less minimal approach. When North Sea Echoes does attempt to hit a little harder with bass-leaning patches and the rare bit of guitar distortion, songs lean toward a build reminiscent of Matheos’ OSI work, albeit approached with a voice fueled by a passion for life in all its peaks and valleys (“Flowers in Decay,” “Empty”).

However, in this post rock-informed, downtempo-tinged, ambient-goaled, North Sea Echoes has a hard time finding hypnosis in any particular realm of relaxation that Really Good Terrible Things enters. After a fairly snappy two-track kick-off, the dreamy-pedaled “Unmoved” springs to life with Alder’s sultry, somber allure in full force, so much so that at the nine-minute mark we’ve already encountered a crescendo far too large—complete with the extended “aaaah aaaah” de-escalation to fade—for an album with seven more slow-burning steps remaining. Later with “Where I’m From” and “We Move Around the Sun” Alder again reaches for the throats of his fiery words only to come back down to a waning, repetitive vocalization. One of these three tracks by itself could have provided the necessary peak in this kind of extra chilled-out Portishead-y experience, but scattered they work against each other to create a successful float.

On the plus side, most of the music rests in the hands of Matheos’ strings and synths, the former of which remains both the most expressive and expansive across this ten-track trek. It’s hard to say whether Really Good Terrible Things would have faired better as an instrumental set, as tracks like “Flowers in Decay,” “Throwing Stones,” and “No Maps” capture a powerful unison between Matheos’ diverse amplifications and Alder’s butter-melting serenades. And if it weren’t for guest Gunnar Olsen simultaneously riding steady on “Throwing Stones” and crashing the kit on “Empty,” I wouldn’t have noticed much that the rest of the percussive presence is all of Matheos’ spacious programming, which shines on the glitchy, upbeat kicker “The Mission.” Closer “No Maps,” however, does stumble a bit in its guitar-lite presentation, relying on a gradual, swirling synth build and Alder to put a lightly-etched period on its still digestible run.

Though, unless you’re really into what North Sea Echoes has to say—the lyrics are fairly uplifting all around—there’s a good chance you’ll check out at some point. I know I did. As a fan of ambient music, I crave immersion. And, despite the time-tested pedigree of the legendary performers involved on Really Good Terrible Things, that immersion never quite finds its pillow-y, smothering hold. Never stealing my breath nor providing the internal space for an inhale that pulls in all the world’s healing air, North Sea Echoes, for me, is neither swell nor even splash.

Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Metal Blade Records | Bandcamp
Websites: northseaechoes.com | facebook.com/northseaechoesofficial | northseaechoes.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: February 23rd, 2024