Album Review
The guitars on Black Aura My Sun seem to arrive from somewhere beyond the room. They gather in long, glowing layers, blurring the boundary between a chord and the echo it leaves behind. Matthew Doty, recording as Deserta, places his voice deep inside that light. You can make out a melody before you can quite make out the person singing it, and the distance gives these songs their peculiar pull.
Doty's background in Saxon Shore and Midnight Faces helps explain the meeting of expansive instrumental textures and pop instinct here. His debut under the Deserta name has the scale of shoegaze, but its emotional world feels close and domestic. There is longing in the music, along with a tenderness that keeps its darker passages from turning cold. The arrangements can fill every available inch of space while still suggesting someone quietly trying to reach another person.
“Save Me” establishes that balance immediately. Its patient momentum gives the swelling guitars somewhere to go, and Doty's submerged vocal keeps the song anchored to a human feeling. “Paradiso” stretches the same vocabulary into a broader, more luminous shape. The pleasure comes from hearing the layers settle around the melody, then discovering another line moving underneath them.
“Monica” brings the album's pop sensibility into sharper focus. There is a memorable song beneath the haze, and the atmosphere makes its yearning feel suspended rather than neatly resolved. “Hide” is the record's emotional center: an extended space where intimacy and uncertainty can occupy the same moment. Doty understands how a repeated phrase or a sustained sound can carry feeling without requiring a dramatic change every few seconds.
The quieter ache of “Be So Blue” gives the record another shade, while “I'll Be Gone” introduces a more fleeting sense of presence. By the closing “Black Aura,” the album feels less like a sequence of separate songs than a place you have spent time inside. Its coherence is a strength, although it can also flatten the distinctions between tracks. A few passages linger on an already established mood longer than they need to, and another sharp melodic turn would have made the softer stretches more memorable.
Still, Black Aura My Sun earns its immersion. Doty's best songs make the familiar machinery of dream pop feel personal: the reverb becomes distance, the layered guitars become warmth, and the faint voice at their center becomes something worth following. It is a strong debut that rewards both the first rush of sound and the details that emerge after it fades.
