Album Review: Beartooth - 'Pure Ecstasy'
Becoming one of the biggest, loudest, and most honest metalcore acts in the scene right now, Beartooth are in the midst of a new evolution both personally and musically. Beginning with their previous release The Surface, the American outfit are continuing on their destined path of success with a whole new set of directions. Following this road further into brighter backgrounds, this is Pure Ecstasy.
Opening with the title track, it sets the mood for the record. It’s the signature metal influences at play while what feels like starting all over again. Ending with a stripped-back recording of frontman Caleb Shomo singing the chorus, the track runs smoothly into the follow-up, ‘Eyes Closed’. A track about moving through life blind to the future - described literally in the lyrics as moving “with my eyes closed” - it can be a meeting of both the positives and negatives. Realising that living life without seeing, hearing and feeling everything is not living in any way, and coming to terms with what comes after said realisation sets in.
Shomo’s vocals have taken a step up not only in quality with this record, but in the soul and the passion behind it. Duetting with himself on this record, in the likes of ‘Eyes Closed’, it is an artistic choice that mirrors two sides of one personality talking, debating, arguing. Something that every person has had at one time or another over life events, identity crises, and other parts of the human experience. Contrastingly, Shomo can also highlight almost immediately after this how he can take sole storytelling to a new level; such as in ‘Bullshit’, where his vocal aspect changes throughout the chorus as it grows louder, rougher, and ends as full on guttural screams of pain and anxiety.
At the midpoint of the album is ‘Free’, the first single released and the first taste of the new era given to fans. It’s lighter in tone, while not compromising on musical composition. An uplifting song that comes across as both a therapeutic exercise and a heavy rock anthem. With Shomo’s soft chants of, “I’m free, I’m free, I’m free”, it expresses the pure no-holding-back flow of energy that comes out when obstacles are out of the way. When the weight of the world falls off one’s shoulders for the first time. However, including references to pain and suffocation could also throw in a conflicting reason to the sudden release of freedom: the implication that one is not free in life, but feeling free in the afterlife.
Beartooth have acquired the fame and fan following they received from being as open and uncensored as possible about anxiety, depression, repression and feeling tied down to life’s cruel nature. Pure Ecstasy however seems to be taking a new turn, with a new energy running through the band that took all this time to understand and hone into their creative crafts.
Ending the record with ‘I Made It’, it closes everything on the highest note the band could possibly bring to the eleven-track masterpiece. Beginning with a phone recording about promising to begin living authentically and being true to oneself, this is the track that stands out as the most personal and meaningful for Beartooth and Shomo himself. With the context of the vocalist’s recent emotional and identity transformation, this pulls at the heartstrings with every lyric. With the music fading out slowly at the end, with Shomo’s voice becoming softer, more fragile, the record closes with the hardest hitting lyric of its entirety: “I guess loving myself could never be true”.
Pure Ecstasy is a waging war within oneself coming to its end, and determining what the result of this war will be. It’s either risking everything to become fully and completely actualised and live how one feels happiest; or toughing it out and conforming for everyone’s sake until being granted freedom upon death. It reflects the wider social and political culture and the effect that can have on individuals that do not meet the standards of what is right, what is normal, and what is expected, and how they come out of that hellscape. However, as the album title and the closing song reflect, there is never a better feeling than just being oneself. That is the best way of experiencing pure ecstasy.
Words by Jo Cosgrove
