Progressive screamo that inspires (over)challenges: with their second work spill | want | Erase to build Black Mass those advantages from those of the predecessor The thoughts of a pale face Established for the New Jersey band in 2017.
although spill | want | Erase has now been running for almost a month without any signs of wear Black Mass with a release date in early December 2022, it’s simply too late to attack the corresponding annual charts: they absolutely deserve it, but it happened in the 50 minutes of their second studio album beyond the legacy of City of Caterpillar simply too much to be able to process it adequately in such a short time.
On an album that screams its unfiltered passion so intensely, raw and direct; the compositionally and instrumentally so sophisticated in a grandiosely produced sound image (by Saetia/Off Minor man Steve Roche), which sounds full and rich so organically as if you were standing right next to the quartet in the rehearsal room; that somewhere between early The Dispute and Birds in Row seems to do without classic riffs and sweeps the hooks so quickly in a great sequenced stream of pure dynamics that you can hardly keep up – which is why the songwriting seems to give more weight to the aesthetics than compositionally induced sticky scenes -; yes, on such an album you just stand for a long time in the middle of a formally disorienting whirlwind, where it simply takes time until you actually find your way around the events, have processed the flashes of inspiration and can suddenly swing from one energetic climax to the next .
A crazy jump like in Shapeshift already helps as a characteristic way marker around the middle, when the band first drinks kerosene for a rabies berserker that escalates in grindcore and then after 80 seconds, as the most natural thing in the world, falls into the pumping club trance, as if one had to listen to 90s ambient music. Electronics a la Underworld bring it together with the dubstep of the ’00s where Burial gets psychedelic hallucinations on the dance floor on steroids.
But also one An Endless Cycle // I Was More Than the Weight of My Work – which first takes an atmospheric start, lets the guitars appear from the drums and the vocals behind them scanding until everything fervently detonates, dances and flirts with the math and oscillates so dreamily revels, harmoniously calmly musing, flooded by the music, until the opener comes out with its “None of this is real!“-Attack unties the knots of the segments and parts in such an outrageously catchy manner and escalates in a hyperventilating manner – eats its way into the cortex so relentlessly and is exemplary for the stubborn grip behind the Sturm-und-Drang-
spill | want | Erase resembles in this respect an unpredictable kaleidoscope, whose train to wanton chaos actually has an effective system. hypocrite rubs against the grain, turns jitterily to the left halfway through, brakes to zero to recite – and then rocks up again. Lost Faces grows from the roots of a feedback drone sample and in stoic surges to heavy noise rock, until the drums provoke in an ambush, offering a struggle of groove and peaks, at the climax of which is the deeply vibrating nonchalance and Adrift meanwhile rattles like a rat in math rock with its oscillating guitars and vocals that are between controlled and desperately pissed off April 7th how a ’00s indie dance punk starts rocking at high voltage to end up where the Test Icicles on 3 One G would have delivered.
That’s all great, but it can be even denser: More than before already ignites spill | want | Erase but then as if from a single source, chains his individual songs together to form a large whole.
The more contemplative, thoughtful and calmer A Faint Goodbye tension builds up rumbling and throbbing, slips over impulsively hooking Tristeza Consume (Lowering the Blinds) into the spewing Deathgrind yearning of Eyeless Faces and spits in Wanting (Ghosts Haunting Ghosts) as a roller coaster ride of emotions, a symphonic finale with post-rock rabies, whose evocative drama in You Mean So Much More Than Misery to Me pondered chamber music and in Anchored implores the catharsis one last time with intensity that burns metallically under the fingernails.
The eclectic amalgam of the band, which always sounds more like an unruly community in which everyone seems to want to overtake the other and yet teamwork reigns supreme, is less per se less innovative for the genre than that it is like one ambitious rejuvenation for this: Spill | Want | Erase is hungry without end, but not excessive, and basically even more than just a genre highlight of the year as the current benchmark for the Screamo. It’s a shame that I didn’t catch this record in time.
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