aaamusic | On 07, Mar 2011

Have we been here before? Epic chord progressions, snarls like a dinosaur’s anguished teenage years, and drums going a million to one… but hold your horses. Yes, Darkest Hour are a death metal inspired metalcore outfit, but ‘The Human Romance’, for all its genre trappings, is a far and welcome cry from the (sorry genteel readers) wanky self-indulgence of metalcore.

From the start, the two-parter of ‘Terra Nocturnus’ and ‘The World Engulfed In Flames’ mark this album out as something that pushes the boundaries between these metal subtypes. The former is an echoing, melancholy instrumental, haunting atmospheric sounds playing glacially around a mournful and blissfully simple guitar riff, a stripped-down essence of the artier side of death metal, before launching into the soaring chord/cymbal attack of the latter, monstrous chugging and harmonised guitar underpinned by sprawling percussion attacks. Then we are thrown into a tumultuous hardcore-based onslaught, hard and fast and seething with raw anger. However, the band place care on not merely being as loud and speedy as they can; the vocals are abrasive and thunderous in their grating roar, but they are also coherent, allowing the band’s not-unlikeable lyrical gift to show through the vicious yet well-played and measured assault. Follow-up track ‘Savour The Kill’ is a thrashy stomp played with malign finesse. The metalcore habit of epic chords and over-reliance on machine gun drumming do wear, but the melodies present do in fact merit their claim to be a “melodic metal band”, being not only identifiable, but rather good. The vocals remain as monstrous as ever, but the dual guitar sound and multi-faceted solos recall not so much overenthusiastic guitar students as classical composers. ‘Severed Into Separates’ likewise has this same hint at musical diversity, with an almost approachable verse riff and baroque-tinted attitudes elsewhere.

Sheer insane brutality is the order of the day on manic flailer ‘Your Everyday Disaster’, and yet the balanced mixing and production alongside a real handle on musical textures means the track feels like an accomplishment of hardcore metal lunacy rather than sloppy tempo-molesting or clinical widdling. Ditto with the insane slow/fast breakneck ride of ‘Violent By Nature’, where guttural vocals, technical guitar playing and impossible bass drum battering mix blood and sweat in a climactic heavy metal catharisis.

Of course, the deathcore pitfalls are present from time to time. The stop-start judder of ‘Man & Swine’ is by no means a poor track, but it suffers from monotony in its attempt to be a brutal chug by sacrificing earlier artistic subtleties. However, even here the band don’t lose track of how to inject even the moshpit fodder moments of technical playing with a real sense of atmosphere. On the flipside, ‘Love As A Weapon’ perhaps dwells a little too much on the hearstrings, almost channelling a much more enjoyable and mature Escape The Fate, with overly emotive riffs surrounding metalcore blood-and-storm riffing.

By the time ‘Purgatory’ swings about, we’re provided with a much more nuanced and artistic creation once again, with just the right mix of mood and madness, but the overall feel of the album is quite same-y by now, which is a shame as this track and its successors do have a lot to offer in their tremolo melodicism, their truly phenomenal tightness in the chugs and their experimentation on the boundaries of metalcore. However, despite the envelope being pushed, it tends to be pushed in roughly the same direction on each track.

Penultimate track ‘Terra Solaris’ is the sombre companion to the album’s opener, blending classical flow with tumbling bass drumming and a wailing guitar buildup. Not quite as pretentious as it seems, there is a lot of promise held in the band’s obvious musical prowess, even if eight minutes it outstaying its welcome somewhat. And to close, slightly generic yet by no means tedious hardcore pumeller ‘Beyond The Life You Know’, and even with the now-familiar riffing techniques employed, new dimensions in vocal sound (reverb variations and pitch shifting) mean the track is not a whimper, even if it isn’t quite a bang.

So ‘The Human Romance’ isn’t quite “there” yet. But don’t let that discourage you, as what it has arrived at could be just the guiding light deathcore and metalcore need to lift them into an age of development, rather than simply remaining the ridiculous cousins of better metal genres, and Darkest Hour, with some further bravery, could easily prove to be the pioneers to lift their style out of its dark age.

Author: Katie H-Halinski