Album Review: Loathe – 'I Let It In And It Took Everything'
Every now and then a band comes around and completely destroys every notion that you once had about genre conformity and the limitations that they can be put under whilst in the midst of their industry climb, in trying to conform to what is current. Loathe are the aforementioned, who in their second album prove that a little experimentation is key in standing out from the crowd in order to be one of the long lasting.
‘I Let It In And It Took Everything’ is the kind of whirlwind journey that all listeners of metal/hardcore are seeking to find. Fleeting between emotive verses and chunky growled choruses, it is the kind of album that demands you be strapped in as only the gods of the underworld know what is waiting around the corner. ‘Broken Vision Rhythm’ solidifies their amorphous intermingling of hardcore, doom metal, sludge and alt-rock; whereas ‘Two Way Mirror’ is a stable melodic effort that serves as an amalgamation of Brand New and Deftones. An overwhelming wave of riffage gives way to an echoed synaesthesia-induced nothingness before sullen, melancholic, vocals come back in for another round of sheer destruction.
The band cite Radiohead as an influence, and songs like ‘451 Days’ and ‘Red Room’ are perfect examples of this. The former is a sound bath covered in smog which has an obscure, omniscient soundbite buried beneath the rubble. A hypnotism ensues in synths which take on a pulsing tone. Spectral breathing lulls you into a false sense of security before the cinematic bass notes and nauseatingly searing riffs attack you from all angles. It’s instrumental warfare which showcase Loathe as massacre of the ears in the best way possible.
Whilst the softer moments are intoxicating, it is the primal delving into their heavier side that unsurprisingly dominates it all. ‘Gored’ is a blisteringly aggressive wall of noise, to the point where the deafening cadence is almost overwhelming. A cannonball of oscillating guitar spins in and out of control, almost knocking you back on its return, and just when you think that they couldn’t get any heavier, ‘Heavy Is The Head That Falls With The Weight of a Thousand Thoughts’ completely throws you off the edge of your seat in an assimilation of the senses. The guttural chainsaw chug of a bass line is nauseatingly heavy in its familiar grasp of a hardcore breakdown, but seems to take on a new entity amidst the weight of everything else going on around it.
‘I Let It In And It Took Everything’ is a pouring out of the soul for Loathe, and if they carry on in this trajectory they might just be the kingpins of the underground music scene.
Words by Tyler Damara Kelly