by DAN SOUTHALL
LOATHE have spent the last five or six years getting pushed as the next great evolution in modern heavy music, pulling their sound in every direction possible from dreamy Deftones-esque to heavy metalcore with drum n bass or electro thrown about with wild abandon.
Starting with the Deftones love early, opener “Entrance” is as dreamy as you could hope for, as piano wafts over what is best described as a poem read by vocalist Kareem with almost no hint of his strong Northern accent. This love of dissonant ambience flows for about half of follow up “Block of Flats” before the band finally put the hammer down and investigate their heavier side. Here they excel, mixed with a storming beat the band sound threatening.
This leads into personal favourite track “Fortress Down”, but also onto something that really pulls this album down: the very dry, tinny, almost mechanical sound that has been deliberately produced in it. Drier than any proverb you care to pull up, in the heaviest parts of the album it is genuinely distracting. More than once I changed from headphones to speakers and back to try and figure out what was wrong with my ears. Thankfully they are no worse than they were before this review, but however you choose to listen it will be tough going.Â
It is far less noticeable when the band drift back into their quieter moments such as “Harder to Pretend” or “The Way it Breaks”. The longer the album goes, the harder your ears have to work to keep up, due to the production or lack thereof. And this tiredness truly is a shame because if you can hold out for the final triumvirate of tracks, you tune into some of Loathe’s best work to date, even if the arse falls out of the production and suddenly becomes muddy.
I really want to like this band and what they do. There are large parts of it that make complete musical sense and move the listener at the highest musical levels, but the intervening ambience and reliance on being different for the sake of it sometimes make them very hard to get a distinctive foothold on, and it is this aspect that makes it so difficult to really enjoy almost as much as whatever is going on with the production.
