23 Feb 2021 – I wrote this review at actual, proper album-of-the-year-review kind of time, at the end of December 2020, and due to the shambolic nature in which this blog is kept, despite my promises to the contrary, it has only just found its way up here. So yeah, hopefully this is late enough that it in fact now evokes warm fuzzy feelings of nostalgia for the incomparable delight of 2020.
Well, the bizarre mess that was 2020 did at least bring a slew of fantastic new albums. There was, of course, Beau Bowen’s debut ‘The Great Anticlimax’, covered elsewhere on this site, as well as a great new release from Mike Vennart, an all-time musical hero of mine, entitled ‘In the Dead, Dead Wood’. Another few favourites have been VUKOVI’s sophomore effort ‘Fall Better’, Rina Sawayama’s superb debut, and the mind-boggling ‘Eleventh Hour’ from British prog-metal outfit Novena.
Album of the year though, is a surprisingly easy choice. One new release, more than any other, has both captured the spirit of this dark, disconcerting and gloomy year and also helped me through some of its lower moments. It’s been my most-played album of the year by some distance, and I wouldn’t hesitate to say it’s earned a place among my favourite albums from any year in my living memory. That album is ‘I Let it in and It Took Everything’, the stunning second album from Liverpool-based metal band Loathe, which was released on the 7th of February.
This has been a year in which I’ve rediscovered a love for low-tuned, growly metal music, which in recent years had taken something of a back seat as I explored new styles. I’ve come back to find that tunings have crept lower and lower, and breakdowns have become more punishing, but that creating an atmosphere is often just as important as doling out sonic violence. Loathe do this exceptionally well – the album is a masterpiece of light and shade, with a great many haunting Blade Runner-esque ambient passages punctuating the drop-tuned brutality. But those heavy sections have a compelling atmospheric nature to them as well – their most intense moments have a sound which is uniquely baleful and malevolent. Kadeem France’s growled vocals are superbly vicious and the album is laced with industrial-inspired textures which only add to the sense of foreboding.
The other main sonic component of this album is a far more melodic approach, with some wonderful soaring choruses that invoke Deftones to no small degree – a band whom Loathe cite as one of their stronger influences. This melodicism comes to the fore in lead-off single ‘Two-Way Mirror’, as well as in my favourite track from the album, ‘Is It Really You?’, which is one of the most beautifully melancholic pieces of music I’ve ever heard from a modern metal band. Loathe have a knack for writing rich and sweeping chord progressions, and the orchestration of the guitar and synth parts illustrates them perfectly. Far from being the ‘filler’ such moments might be in the hands of other bands, the aforementioned ambient sections stand up as pieces of music in their own right, and are immensely evocative. There isn’t any filler at all here, really – I’ve found this album to be a fantastic experience to sit through from start to finish, taking everything in as a whole. That isn’t always the case with metal bands.
If, however, you like your metal to come in the form of sheer blunt-force trauma, there is plenty to satisfy you here as well. The guitar sound is nothing short of a malign entity, sometimes taking the form of a thick and ominous cloud of shoegaze-esque noise, sometimes a focused and direct assault using some of the lowest notes you may ever have heard a guitar playing before. It gets quite technical in places, but such is its atmosphere that you don’t really notice that unless you pay specific attention to the parts. It certainly isn’t an album that beats you over the head with chops – there are no solos, and no points at all in which you feel anyone’s showing off for the sake of it.
The band have become somewhat known for contributing to a huge increase in demand (and second-hand prices) for the now-discontinued Squier baritone Jazzmaster used by both guitarists, Erik Bickerstaffe (who also serves as co-lead vocalist) and Connor Sweeney. The tuning? Well, there are a few but (if I remember correctly) all based around the same combination of intervals. It appears the main one they gravitate to is E A E A D F#. And that low E is indeed a bass-register note, for those uninitiated to modern metal and its penchant for whale-bothering low notes. Some tracks, such as the aforementioned ‘Is It Really You?’ move this whole tuning up four semitones, so the lowest note is Ab. On some occasions, however, such as the whirlwind of sonic violence that is ‘Gored’, that E-based tuning is dragged down four semitones so the lowest note is C. That’s right – one fret away from the bottom of a five-string bass, but on guitars. It’s low. And it sounds killer.
(If you’re wondering what bassist Feisal el-Khazragi does when his bandmates are encroaching on his register like this, the answer is NOT going down an octave himself – the trick, it seems, with many bands who tune this low, is to have the guitars and bass at the same pitch but using the instruments’ differing tonal characteristics to fill out the different frequencies.)
This album is the sound of 2020 for me. I’m aware that this sounds like damning with faint praise after the spectacularly wank year we’ve suffered, but I don’t mean it in that way. It’s more to say that this album has, for me, captured the low moments uniquely and spoken to me during those, but its sheer accomplishment and brilliance has also hugely enhanced the times when I’ve listened to it in a better frame of mind. In other words, it’s been an important album and one which I’m certain will stand the test of time as a high point for the current wave of metal bands.
The other side effect of this album review being posted so late is that Loathe, whose productivity puts mine to shame, have in fact released another whole album. ‘The Things They Believe’ is out now.