How dismal and thunderously heavy can a band´s music get, and still be utterly engaging? The answer is probably Adur´s music on this high-velocity album.
A dark Ambient opening track, “Arrival”, introduces the album´s bleakness with an indistinct sampled voice before riffs kick-start the controlled aggressiveness, the dense onslaughts trying to drown out the intense screaming vocals with throbbing, heaving, and sinking bass, and the relentless, heavy, thundering, and versatile drumming. As if to contradict this massive charge, the first words sung in the second song “Silhouette” are “I would give everything / I have / Every part of me / To quiet the noise”.
Adur stem from Brighton, UK, with veterans from the local metal scene. The collective that is Adur melts their musical background from everything louder than everything else: Metalcore, Sludge, Noise, Ambient, Doom, Post-Metal – you name it. They hold no prisoners, having created an album with some of the heaviest and most versatile music I have heard in the Metal universe this year. A sure contender for AOTY. Around the same time last year, I remember reviewing Norna´s latest and a bit later Still´s latest. It is like an echo of those bands (and others, of course) when Adur unleashes the brisk and despairing sonics upon the listener. Just the cover of the album should make you head over to Bandcamp and buy a copy.
The invigorating album continues with music that sometimes is at the brink of imploding in pure noise, but never does – always charging forward as shown by the heavy opening of the title song, “We Fail to Love Ourselves”. Brisk riffs, low-end bass, and relentless drums give immense depth to the sonic atmosphere that surrounds the screaming vocals. A fast-paced melodic theme rushes forward, pushing the rasping Screamo until the music turns into heavier soundscapes. It is ferociously hard as the guitars slip into tremolos, forming a melodic theme within the tumultuous chaos formed by the pulsating bass and persistent drumming. Suddenly there is a breather part where the rough guitars spread out, and two clean vocals speak before the music fuses back into the dense fast-paced heaviness from the opening and the lyrics ending the song with “If I’ve learned anything / I’ve come to expect / These feelings of dread / These feelings of dread / Nothing left but fear” - lyrics that capture the atmosphere of the album.
With “The Longing”, the album continues along the same lines; the tempo is high, and the heaviness continues. The guitars form melodic themes followed by fighting vocals, always changing rhythm and musical directions. It turns and shifts and makes it utterly engaging, leaving the listener with a sense of breathlessness until the changing pace of a chugging guitar emerges that leads the music into a new, discordant direction with relentless chugging and a hard-hitting rhythm section. Then comes a reprieve where the vocals are clean and echoing softly before the music fuses back into uncontrollable chaos, but with soft, clean vocals soaring above it all.
“Null” is a real breather, a pause to reflect and to prepare for the immense chords that open “The One Percent” which is a song not so much filled with bleak anxiety as the previous one, but a fierce and rebelling attitude as shown in the two last verses of the song: We’re just cogs in their machines / No sense of empathy / Just care about return of investment / It’s modern slavery. / Cut throat ROAS mother fuckers / No sick pay no sympathy / Can’t help but feel the resentment / Last chance for redundancy… “
The music spins further into “Self Control”, advancing the high-velocity sonics, hammering on with dense metalcore riffs and hoarse vocals. A subtle shift in the flow with a fuzzy guitar flying high during the music before the vocals come back. Then it turns into bass-driven heaviness and fuzzy guitars glissading around the bass and the desperate vocals. It all comes back together with fuzzy guitars spreading out while the drums hammer on until the end.
“Nothing Grows” is another dark Ambient sound with an indistinct female voice talking before the unstoppable music is back in “Nothing Lives In This Soil” before it spreads out, with high-pitched timbres hidden inside all the heaviness. The guitars, high and mighty, shift and turn between higher pitches, tremolos, and hard riffs before panning out in the end.
“Permanence” - an assault on your senses as the music lunges forward along a blitzing guitar, creating noisy chaos before coming back into heavy tremolos, extremely fast bass, and drums. There are quick twists and turns, the guitars are all over the place, held together by the rhythm section. The fierceness reaches another peak here.
The album ends with “The End Of Us”, opening with a luring, clear, mellow guitar and with hits on the drums and bass. The song slowly intensifies until it surges into hurricane-like sonics eternally swirling and circling between screaming and clear, resilient vocals. The guitars heave and sink in dissonance, resulting in a discordant controlled mess with breathing bass below and hard-driving drums. It is a furious closing statement that finally simmers down to static and clear strings, ending with a melancholy voice singing with clear echoing vocals: “Swallow the shame that we are living in / Put out the flame that we were keeping alight.”
