3 out of 5

Label: Acerbic Noise Development

Producer: The Devil and the Sea?

This is probably the best-intended possible three star rating I can give.  It’s not meant to represent a lacking, rather to show that this 4-song mini-album / demo hits every note perfectly.  It is entirely predictable, or rather, it doesn’t have any defining element to bump it above the crowd, but it is incredibly rewarding to listen to something that doesn’t make a single misstep.  And don’t misread that as the album being cookie cutter – quite the opposite.  The Devil and the Sea play the shit out of these songs.  There’s a difference between something between just right and something being typical.  There are a ton of typical hardcore bands out there that just scream and growl on command and slap a clean rumble onto the production and do a stop, breakdown, double-bass drum thing when needed.  That’s not what this is.

Sometimes, an album will be “perfect, if only the band hadn’t…” or, “if only the band had done…” …and I don’t have either of those to say about this demo.  There will be moments that remind you of various elements of hardcore – and I’m gonna’ name Hydra Head groups ’cause that’s where my listening experience is – but there’s the sludge rock of Cable, the slow-core to punk mix of Cavity, and then even elements of something like Mare (who sound like a hardcore Deftones thank to the lead singer, whoops).  After a wash of introductory sounds, this demo (…Or is that the album name…?) tinkles into a massive slab of quiet-to-loud 7+ minute chunk of metal that breaks at just the right moments, adds just the right flourishes to the drums, and pitches the distorted vocals at just the right level in the background to keep them valid within the song but not clear enough to have you studying what the shouts might mean.  Things speed up for our next track – the lack of break between songs perhaps the only criticism I have here, because there’s a notable jump in the audio when the song switches – and then the thing concludes with another 7+ minute jam.  The band changes things up enough to keep those longer tracks from feeling like stretches, but there’s enough sludge to also not make it feel like it wraps up too soon.

Can you predict when the distortion is going to come in?  When the spoken vocals will switch to screams?  When the stop-starts are coming?  For sure.  There’s nothing exactly new, here, but there’s nothing to criticize beyond that, and if you can play the norm exceedingly well and with a sense of honesty, then that’s well worth my time.