Scottish rockers Biffy Clyro have reached a career milestone; a gold certification for their debut album Blackened Sky.
Biffy Clyro’s debut album ‘Blackened Sky’ has just been certified Gold in the UK https://t.co/J1lWPfrbvj pic.twitter.com/YqWMOwM1ja
— Rock Sound (@rocksound) December 22, 2021
Blackened Sky was released nearly twenty years ago, on the 10th of March 2002, initially to somewhat mixed reception. Music critic John Murphy praised the band in a review in the publication MusicOMH, comparing the band to Nirvana: “…it was Nirvana that broke into the mainstream and paved the way for a bunch of kids to pick up a guitar and form a band. Biffy Clyro are one of those bands.” Despite this, Murphy also inferred that despite the album’s strengths, it was not a record that boasted any standout songs or potential hits.
As the years have gone by, however, Blackened Sky has found a home in the hearts of many a listener. In 2017, a blog called Transistor published a retrospective review of the album, offering up a great deal of praise and a new perspective: “Blackened Sky is an enthralling listen from start to finish, and is a record that showcases a more experimental Biffy Clyro than the chart-topping one we know today…. On Blackened Sky, Biffy Clyro announced themselves as a band with stratospheric potential, but also one with more than enough talent at present. It places festival-ready anthems comfortably alongside some of the most obscurely brilliant tracks the band has ever written, showcasing the band’s massive potential but also their unwillingness to scale the mountain in any way but their own.”
Sonically, the record carries the seeds of what Biffy Clyro would become as they progressed as a group, but with a very raw, angsty edge that would perhaps be associated with American emo and grunge bands of the 1990s.
The guitars range from wistful and brooding motifs to titanic walls of noise, and whilst the band retain their very own sound- aided particularly by singer Simon Neil’s tuneful and expressive voice- the tonality of many of the songs might warrant comparison to groups such as Mineral and Sunny Day Real Estate.
Whilst early reviews of the record may have implied that it possessed no real standout tracks, several songs from the album have become fan favourites over the years, such as “27”, “57” and “Justboy”, all of which have reached over two million streams on Spotify.
The record, along with the rest of the band’s musical catalogue, can be found on all streaming services, and physical copies of the record can be found here.
