c.layne Album Recommendations: "The Sun Will Come Out to Blind You [Original Mixes]"

Album Reviews

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

c.layne

[#] The Sun Will Come Out to Blind You [Original Mixes] (2005)

High calibre grubby minimalist downtempo.

Reviewed May 30, 2025

The Sun Will Come Out to Blind You [Original Mixes] album art

The transition away from the hazy, undefined sister worlds of Antonymic and Drawing Shapes With Sounds was a quick one. By the very next year, c.layne had begun work on a more minimalist, earthy downtempo effort that downplayed the guitars, thick with the rumble of synthbasses and drum machines and loops no longer content to keep time unobtrusively. This would become the original demos of The Sun Will Come Out to Blind You, shelved as a more polished and sonically constructed version came out on Magnatune in 2005. Now that you can hear this original version again, what's the verdict? Truth be told, I like it a good bit better.

The original version of Blind You is a thin sliver of sonic midnight, not pumped up, but precise. The lack of the overblown orchestral elements and rewrites of c.layne's already catchy melodies helps the songs to shine through without much in the way of adornment. The slow burn duet of detachment "Less of You" (featuring the sadly long M.I.A. Revel Yth and her lovely voice) sits as tidily alongside the crunchy, pulsating "Vertigo Blues" as the Pink Floyd-esque acoustic ballad "Fight the Sea" does next to icy, eerie closer "Everybody's Going Underground", largely made up only of layers of c.layne's voice. I'm sure you can make a case for this sounding unfinished, but compare it to what got released, and it's pretty clear less is more.

Essential:	"Less of You", "Vertigo Blues", "Fight the Sea"
Quintessential:	"You Are the Reason"
Non-Essential:	"How Soon I Forget"
Rating:
Further listening:	Stream from c.layne's SoundCloud