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Outer Wilds

A new frontier for the interactive experience

Moments in gaming which are truly ground-breaking are rare, and they are only getting rarer. A dual axiom of diminishing technological returns achieved by the jumps between console generations and the rampant predatory monetisation of the games as a service modal have had many despairing and looking to games that denounce photorealism and market trends for inspiration , in much the same way those in the art world despaired at the first cameras. As they could no longer make art more detailed technically, meaning and artistry moved from technique to statement. Why is it not photorealistic? The question posed today is the same. You could make a game that is an accurate reflection of life – or a biased reflection of a certain kind of life (Military-industrial complex funded shooters I’m looking at you) – so why have you chosen to instead create something with a particular art style? What is the combination of your narrative and design choices trying to say? 

In the case of Far Cry 5, when particular attention is paid to the fact that the cultists are under the influence of drugs for the game’s entirety in addition to Obsidian’s claims that their new game concerning corporate exploitation of space colonies is written apolitically with empathetic and ‘good’ characters on both sides, the aim is all too often to actively stop you from drawing any meaningful conclusion at all, or at the very least to give the impression that there is nothing to draw.

What is the aim of this spiel then? In reality, you don’t need context to enjoy Outer Wilds, but only within the nexus of the modern games industry can you see why I’ve grown to love it so much. It also lets me talk about the game in more abstract terms without spoiling it – as it is very hard not to spoil it in talking about it, as knowledge is the only progression system within the game. The game itself, mechanically, is very stripped back. You have a spaceship to explore the solar system with, a spacesuit with thrusters for exploring each of the planets you can land on, and a translation device, which allows you to understand the language of an ancient alien race which inhabited the solar system many years prior. The story orients you as the first of your race to explore the stars with this new translation device. Explorers has previously visited each planet in the solar system, but contact with them has been lost, and they cannot translate the language there. Your objective, insofar as you are given one, is to find them and learn about the ancient aliens. In an age where open-world games have quest markers and some, such as Skyrim, have a spell which paints a trail on the ground in the direction of the next objective, the handhold-free nature of Outer Wilds is charming and arresting.

Whenever you discover anything important, it is stored in your ship’s log at the back of your small spaceship. In a way, it reminded me of Morrowind, one of Skyrim’s forebears, with the journal giving hints as to where you ought to look, but no real help beyond collating what you already know so that you can easily reference it in future. You are free to explore any of the planets at any point, and follow any lines of inquiry you see fit. In a lesser game, this would lead to a disjointed narrative experienced so out of order that it would give Tarantino a headache. However, this leads me into talking about the level design. I could not laud any higher the way in which the planets are designed. Every planet has a dynamic twist to it you need to learn in order to be able to understand how to access information on it and each planet has areas that require you to piece together learnings from around the solar system in order to access. In every sense, the game rewards exploration and understanding as a means of progress, rather than giving you new tools and telling you how to use them. This is evident in each of the planet designs – which I will briefly explain in the order I visited them (there is no ‘proper’ order).

 Giant’s Deep 

 A swirling, green water planet with four islands, which are continually tossed around by an endless stream of cyclones which make the planet hard to navigate. The pole is protected by a ferociously large cyclone and a strong current prevents underwater exploration of a porous, but fiercely electromagnetic core. The sheer size and oppressive atmosphere is compounded by the strong gravity making it almost impossible to jump, incentivising careful exploration.

 Brittle Hollow

A hollow planet built around a black hole and beset by fiery meteors from its volcanic moon. With an inhospitable surface, much of the challenge comes from discovering how others adapted to these conditions previously, and how to use the gravity of the black hole to navigate a planet that slowly falls apart and disintegrates as the game goes on due to the constant meteor bombardment.

 The Wanderer

A frozen comet with an elliptical orbit that takes it within a lethal range of the sun, and covered in mysterious ‘ghost matter.’

 The Hourglass Twins

Two planets orbiting each other as they orbit the sun. One starts as a bare rock with many caves to explore; the other as a perfectly round desert planet, with absolutely zero to explore. Then, a large column of sand starts flowing through space from the desert planet ‘Ash Twin’ to the bare one, ‘Ember Twin.’ This means areas of each planet are only accessible at certain times, and you need to beware of the sand level when exploring caves.

 Dark Bramble

A planet consisting purely of thorny branches wrapped around a core that pulses with white light. Enter the hole, and caverns that bend the laws of space and time fill massive areas within. A Tardis of horrors, this planet scared me like no jump scares could. A truly eerie vibe – a memorable and haunting level unlike anything I’d ever played before.

 While every one of these planets is in its own way unique and memorable, as are the moments when you discover how to access parts of them you couldn’t before – the best example of the game’s genius comes in the form of a location known as the Quantum moon. Before you go to this location, there are three pieces of key knowledge you need. Without them, you shouldn’t even be able to land on it. Nevertheless, I accidentally managed to land on it early in the game. However, because I hadn’t yet solved how to get into the tower of Quantum knowledge on Brittle Hollow, I didn’t understand how to access where I wanted to go. The moon has a secretive ‘Sixth Location’ you wish to explore, but every time I tried to leave the control room, the way was blocked by rocks until the moon moved back to one of the five locations in our solar system. It wasn’t until a few hours later, when I was following a different lead on another planet that I figured out how to avoid the rocks, and also where I needed to go once I had made it out.

The game is filled with eureka moments, and the lack of handholding makes you feel like you have genuinely accomplished something when you solve a puzzle. For example, I discovered a much quicker shortcut to a key area called the Black Hole Forge. The game doesn’t penalise you for this; much of the beauty of the game comes in the journey. Translating the alien scriptures in each area contains hints as to the overarching story – which I won’t in any way spoil, except that it is moving, inspiring and heart-breaking in equal measure – but also contains deeply personal stories about the people who made these structures, these homes, these technologies. The tension among the clan as they tried debated their plans to achieve what they came to our solar system for. The romance and feeling amongst those who worked on their projects. The jubilation of breakthroughs and the let-downs of defeat. The struggle for life and the joys of overcoming the hostile worlds of the system. The heart-wrenching story of the Quantum moon. All pieced together in bitesize chunks, out of sequence, displaced. Abstractions anthropomorphised because we don’t know enough about them to truly contextualise them. You never even find out what these aliens looked like. But you discover their hopes, their aims, their dreams and their death – as you, the traveller from an antique land, stare at the vast and trunkless legs of stone.

Rather purposefully, I have been abstract in my descriptions and generalised the experience. In a game where knowledge is the means of progression, and real detail would be a spoiler, and its best to come into this game blind. So, I’ve chosen to focus on the feeling the game instils in you. It has a charming art direction, understated yet distinctive music that complements every area perfectly and a real warmth and passion that oozes from every pixel. In a world where every new innovation is immediately copied and run into the ground by every game in the same genre – the camp clearing from Far Cry 3 is now a chore in every vaguely open world game- or climbing the conveniently placed towers to gain map vision a la Assassin’s Creed – or that very same game series doing its very best Witcher 3 impression in Origins and Odyssey – there is an incorruptible heart to Outer Wilds. There will be games inspired by it, no doubt, but there won’t be other games that weaponise knowledge in quite the same way, or use it to explore the same themes. It’s a game about futility, about facing death but choosing to explore and challenge yourself and improve and, most importantly, to enjoy the little things and cherish the detail, to find pieces of light in that endless, futile dark.  

Games like this have always been few and far between, and are becoming even rarer now. That’s why it’s essential we cherish games like Outer Wilds. There is no formula for creating a masterpiece but when a game really connects with you, you know it, you feel it. My list of favourite games I’d consider a masterpiece is quite incongruent – SSX 3, Tony Hawk’s Underground, Assassins Creed 2, Halo 4 to pick out a few of the rather different ones –  but Outer Wilds has topped all of them, and I only spent around 12 hours with it. It strips gaming back to its essentials, while bringing new ideas to the table and presenting them in charming and arresting ways. You will never have another 12 hours like it. Its heart, soul and message are inimitable, and I sincerely urge you to open up to it and give it a try.

10/10

Played on Xbox - the game is available through Xbox Game Pass

@CoreLineage on twitter

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Amo - Bring me the Horizon

Sem Amor

There have been many hot takes on Bring Me The Horizon’s 6th album in recent weeks. Many of these have been unfair criticisms levied by those who still haven’t forgiven the band for abandoning straight up metalcore what is now 3 albums and almost a decade ago. I’m not one of those people. I like their entire discography, but my favourite two albums are That’s the Spirit and Sempiternal, and I grew up on Pendulum and daft punk and threw myself head first into dubstep and then future house in the early 2010s. So I’m not coming at this from an anti-electronic angle, and I like their pop direction. So everything I’d heard about this album was poised for it to click with me, and quite frankly, it just didn’t. Of course, that’s hardly a review, so I’m now going to try and dismantle exactly why I don’t think it resonated, and that’s a lot harder than my usual schtick of fanboying about music that speaks to me.

First, lets talk about what I loved. The collab with grimes called “Nihilist Blues.” This was dark, moody pop that was a progression from their moody pop rock from TTS. Grimes’ airy vocals contrast Oli’s restrained yet still markedly dark delivery chillingly – his delivery of “spirit in a tube” reminds me of Katy B’s delivery on the chorus of Katy on a Mission, one of my favourite tracks of all time. The heavy heavy electronic beats are impactful and unforgettable, unlike in many other spots of the album. Why couldn’t we have got an album of this?

Heavy Metal gave me a good laugh. A song called heavy metal that is actually a rap about the metalheads who still wont give up on giving them stick for making pop records, even though they’ve been making pop records longer than metal records now. All the punches land and the chorus is catchy. Other shoutouts are the incredibly catchy chorus of Medicine which still jams despite cringy 14 year old lyrics; the riff of Wonderful life which is distorted in an interesting way and Why you gotta kick me when I’m down is heartfelt with an excellent electronic breakdown at the end.

A key point here amongst all these points is that nothing I said I liked in the above two paragraphs were within two songs of each other. This is a bloated and incoherent album in my opinion. Outwith ‘I apologise if you feel something’ which wouldn’t work as anything other than an intro track – it isn’t a full track – this album is as well played on shuffle as listened through in order. We have a spooky and eerie intro which leads straight into the bombastic, overblown cringefest that is Mantra. Its catchy but I can’t shake the feeling the riff is just Club Foot given the spinal tap treatment and the lyrics are again a letdown. I forgive the lyrics on TTS because I like the atmosphere of the record but there is no consistent atmosphere or mood here so it just comes off as an aberration. You can tell they recorded it after the album was finished specifically to be a single. I presume the album was meant to transition straight from the intro to Nihilist Blues, which would make far more sense. In the dark is just forgettable, it made no impression whatsoever, and then we go into the very strange collab with Dani Filth, of the band Cradle of filth. Its just a confusing mess of a song. A great riff, with parts where Oli talks over the top about the brain decaying then mumbles about forgetting what hes on about, then going into the chorus. I know it’s meant to be irreverent but it just comes across as a waste of a good song. The lyrics in this song and in Sugar, Honey, Ice and Tea are not cringy but loveable in the same way as many of their songs in the past have been, they’re just straight up insultingly bad.

Ouch is an inoffensive and at least cohesive follow up to Wonderful life, and I find medicine incredibly catchy, with a great hook. However, this is followed by Sugar, Honey, Ice and Tea. Now where do I start with that. Where do I start. The change in tone back to Alt-rock comes out of nowhere. The fact that the joke of the chorus is that we’re all full of… Sugar, Honey, Ice and Tea… yeah. Put the first letters of each word together. Yeah. That is a genuine chorus written by a man in his 30′s. Moving on, the rap influenced ‘why you gotta kick me when I’m down’ is very well produced and heartfelt. It’s a high point of the album and the electronic breakdown at the end is excellent. Fresh Bruises has an eerie intro and then some very heavy beats with pitch shifted layered vocals that between this and the previous song actually start to establish a mood for the first time on the album. However, this is offset by the generic and forgettable Mother Tongue which goes straight into the very heavy “Heavy Metal.” As I’ve said above, I love everything about this song. It has a great message. It made the metalcore subreddit very angry. It has a fantastic beat, interesting breakdown, and the irony of ending on one of his trademark screams is excellent – even if it does make me wish I could have a few more. The ending song about his friend with cancer is an emotional way to end the album but it feels odd coming off the back of heavy metal – I’d maybe have put heavy metal before mother tongue, then a softer transition into this. I feel like it loses some of its emotional impact via juxtapositional context.

Summing up this album is incredibly hard. On the one hand It has no flow and is generally incoherent in terms of identity, and on a thematic level. It veers like a drunk driver from alt-rock to rap beats to various EDM influences and the 1975 influences are very apparent on the slower electronic tracks. It doesn’t feel like artistic evolution but artistic desperation. That said, a number of the songs are genuinely excellent and have been on heavy rotation in my playlist. The only song that has nothing going for it is Sugar, Honey, Ice and Tea. The others are either forgettable or have a redeeming feature – the riff in wonderful life for example. They show that they are excellent musicians and artists throughout but it feels incongruent and I feel like it is worse listened to as a whole than simply with songs taken as singles, and its honestly the first time I’ve felt that way about an album in a long time. I remember not vibing with all the singles for The American Dream by Trophy Eyes but in the context of the album I thought it was a masterpiece when taken as a whole. But I don’t remember feeling the reverse. This album just leaves me with an odd feeling. BMTH are a band I’ve liked for a long time, and 4 of the songs off their new record are in heavy rotation in my playlist. However, I don’t think I can in good faith give it more than a 5 because in my opinion it’s not an album, it’s a collection of songs, Some of which I love, some of which I disliked and some of which I forgot, in relatively equal measure. It is a tonal and quality sin wave of an album, but despite the amount of criticism I would encourage you to give it a listen anyway. As with every album i write about, I only write about it if I think there is something good in it that I want to write about. In this case, it’s spread thin in places, but nonetheless, there is genuine artistic merit in the high points of this album.

5/10

Key songs:

Nihilist Blues; Medicine; Heavy Metal; Why you gotta kick me when I’m down

@CoreLineage on Twitter

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Secret Band - LP2

A fully realised experimental side project.

Names aren't Secret Band's strong suit. After a self titled Ep and self titled Lp, 5 years later they return with the unimaginatively named Lp 2. The title is where the lack of imagination ends. An experimental side project by Dance Gavin Dance bassist Will Swan and unclean vocalist Jon Mess, both are liberated to try things well beyond the Dance Gavin Dance style. 

Jon's vocals are the first thing you notice on album opener 'Upgrades' – a definite upgrade on his work in DGD - unhinged and raw, his technique never fails to impress as he digs into his trademark cryptic lyricism. As always, his lyrics are written to fit the music, and never written until the song itself is – meaning that every line is a perfect fit to the music, but he never so much addresses points as alludes to them, moving from reference point to reference point leaving the listener to fill in the gaps. Sometimes its just nonsense to make it fit, like howling at the Moon in 'moon', or stealing gorillas in 'Black Dolphin', but sometimes, the chorus about his memories in ‘Rabbit Hole' being the prime example, it feels like he is really driving at something profound.  Will Swan's riffs continue to be some of the most ingenious in rock and this album excels there too – the pounding riffs and drums of ‘Lightning’ being my personal high point, with the opener ‘upgrades’ also being excellent in that regard.

The creative freedom means faster, more aggressive drum patterns and genre experimentation that reaches into metal rather than pop. The intro to track 6 ‘Do it again’  is heavily inspired by sounds of bands like Rings of Saturn, to name just one example. Ultimately, how well this album sits with you is very subjective. If you are looking for background music, this isn’t it – it will just blend into a noise. If you listen to this kind of music for the technical prowess and invest yourself in lyricism, you’ll find an odd but rewarding experience, with the constant topic changes of the cryptic lyrics inviting you to try and understand them, and make the links in your head. Most of these links will be completely unintended on the part of the band, but that’s the beauty of it – your experience with it will be completely different to mine based on the ways you try to make sense of it. If that’s not your thing, that’s no crime, but when a band with this much technical ability and creativity use that as a solid platform to create an album as relentlessly intriguing as this, I’d implore you to give it a go and see where it takes you. Probably a lot further than Jon Mess was intending when putting the lyrics together. But that’s the point.  I love this album and everything about it, and I hope it resonates with other listeners as well as it did with me.

9/10

Key Tracks: Rabbit Hole, Lightning, Upgrades, Black Dolphin

@CoreLineage on twitter

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Periphery IV: Hail Stan

Periphery drop an AOTY contender  

Versatility is built into the periphery mission statement – the only thing you know for certain when listening to a new release from them is that they will continue to push the boundaries of progressive metalcore. From breakbeat and synth to tempestuous drum patterns and riffs that twist and wind like the corkscrew at Laguna Seca – Periphery IV delivers on all fronts. 

Making a 15 minute + song not drag is a monumental task for a band to accomplish, especially when it’s the album opener, but ‘Reptile’ manages to stay instrumentally and lyrically tight, and kick the album into life. The album is structured to frontload all its heaviest moments, and there is very little heavier than ‘Blood Eagle’. A downtuned djent assault, spencer digs deep into his screaming repertoire for one of the most imprinting and haunting metal tracks of the year, if not ever. The aggression remains for ‘CHVRCH BURNER’, which transitions into a techno-infused synth outro which merges into the opening riff of ‘Garden in the Bones’. From ‘Garden in the Bones’ onwards, the album shifts towards a more measured approach, incorporating more electronic and prog rock elements. Spencer is arguably at his best with soaring clean highs on sentient glow and Satellites, with the deep growls used more sparsely, preferring to go from singing to a strained shout without dropping down, and with the production quality of the record it sounds marvellous. The mixing is consistently excellent throughout – the vocals never get lost, no matter how complicated the guitar work and drums, but all of the technical ability is still very much there to see. Every electronic addition has purpose and helps to drive the album forward. From ‘Garden in the bones' to the closer ‘satellite’, this is one of the most forward thinking rock albums of the decade. Catchy, technical, explosive in controlled bursts and reflective outwith that, all without even delving into the lyrical themes underlying the album. Accessible to people whose only exposure to rock and metal may be Blink, Foo Fighters, Muse or Metallica – but uncompromising in its vision and execution. A tantalising introduction to the genres and ideas it encompasses for those who want to dive deeper - for those who don’t, a glistening synopsis. A true album of the year contender, and one everyone should hear this year.

10/10

Key tracks: All of them. If you are new to the genre, however, I’d recommend starting the album at Garden in the Bones, then going back to the first few tracks after you reach the end and are a bit more used to the style.

@CoreLineage on twitter

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While She Sleeps – So What?

On their softest album yet, The Sheffield rockers find a clarity of message.

So What? Is an ambitious project where Sheffield metalcore outfit While She Sleeps find a more melodic and measured approach and gain immeasurably from it. The metalcore sections are given more gravitas by being used sparingly and the deft use of electronics livens up the album while retaining much more focus on the lyrics and their content than chugging guitars would. They’ve found an interesting niche here, rather than using electronic sounds ripped straight from pop songs of the moment as a cash in as many bands are want to do, they use softer melodies to underscore breakdowns or to buoy choruses in much the same way Architects use orchestral sounds. For the most part it is used effectively and as a result, unlike most rock albums with electronic elements, It shouldn’t date as poorly.

The opening track “Anti-Social” has an intro reminiscent of DVSR’s 1v1, a hype track of legendary status, and delivers one of the more aggressive tracks on the album. They lyrics establish the overarching theme of Millennial dissociation from and despair at our countries, societies and discourses, although the chorus is a little weak lyrically.  However, this immediately segways into “I’ve seen it all,” A masterpiece deconstructing the source of the unhappiness we see everywhere in a consumer society. The cadence of the chorus and the great vocal performance will make it anthemic in a live setting and its one of those songs that makes the listener want to get up and move – I got up for a walk round the Jack Martin Corridors when I first heard this at about 2AM on the Friday of release. Its one of those anthemic songs you can’t help but love. Titular song “So What?” explores the core concept of the album – If you do nothing but vapidly consume, so what if you die now or live forever? There’s no meaning to that. After a soft intro that stirs memories of listening to Feeder as a kid, we get an urgent blast of metalcore before the song settles into a catchy electronic hook with soaring noodly riffs layered on top. Without being very heavy, the song fosters a sense of urgency before leading into “The Guilty Party” – one of the heaviest songs on the record and an attempt to deal with the hypocrisy and guilt associated with knowing you as a human are a complicit in everything your music raises awareness against. “Elephant” returns to the DVSResque guitar tones to argue that the elephant in the room is that things are not just not okay now, they have never been okay. We need to change human nature to change the human condition. The softest song on the record, “Good Grief” is about the nature of empathy and how even if we can’t fix all our own problems, we can empathise and help others with theirs. “Set you Free” and “Back of my mind” present some of the most experimental and interesting riffs on the album, before we move into “Gates of Paradise” which acts as a summative paragraph for the themes of the album. Upon first listen it actually drew significant comparisons in function with “I can feel it calling” by Trophy Eyes.

As we can see, this is an album that thematically, lyrically and musically aims very high. Does it pull it off? Well, many albums tackling this subject matter can come off as an angsty, cringe-ridden or childish record. Its to this album’s credit that the only point a lyric made me cringe was the chorus of the first song. I felt it was tonally consistent throughout – I thought it was musically experimental with a continuity of sound enough to help tie the themes but the songs never blend into one another. The use of electronics was some of the best in a rock album I’ve heard in a while as well. Ultimately, at a social moment like the one we are in at the moment, albums like this are entirely justified, and I have no doubt that this is an album that for many people is something they need to hear right now. The musical experimentation means this is something a pop-rock fan can enjoy as well – I have no doubt this album will expand their following massively, and on the back of this I’d say its fully deserved – in my opinion it’s their best work. Not every song is a masterpiece – not every risk pays off, but its well worth a listen and may surprise many, and win unlikely fans from all quarters.

 Essential Tracks: I’ve seen it all, So What, Good Grief

Rating 8/10

@CoreLineage on twitter

[maxg-longform]

Architects - Holy Hell

Trying to review this Architects album immediately throws up several problems as to how to rate it. Its their 7th studio album, but in a way it feels like their first - a band beset by the loss to cancer of guitarist and songwriter Tom Searle, trying to relearn how to make music and how to continue without him. Its an incredibly tough ask, Tom’s riffs were iconic, and his songwriting uniquely political and personal. Their last and most successful album was Tom coming to terms with his own mortality after being terminally diagnosed. And now he’s gone, the band chose to channel their grief into making another album, which is commendable enough – many other bands in such circumstances would have called it quits. So this album eschews a lot of the political tone for a more introspective one. In a way, I think the best way to see the album is almost as a second half to All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us, in retrospect this can be seen as a double album – where in the first half Tom confronts his Mortality, and in the second the band confront Tom’s mortality. Much of the songwriting has now fallen to drummer and brother of Tom, Dan Searle along with singer Sam Carter. While we don’t get to see them engage too much with the political themes that Tom did, they show that on an emotional level they can write moving and emotional songs of a calibre that does him justice. As would be expected, there is a lot of reference to older work, the opening track ‘Death is not Defeat,’ is meant as a direct response to the closing track of All Our Gods – ‘Memento Mori;’ there are references to ‘Gone with the wind,’ throughout with a poignant reflection on Tom’s assertion that hope is a prison. Going further back the theme of religion is discussed in much softer terms here, and the band acknowledge this with callbacks to the virulently anti-religion song ‘Broken Cross’ from the album Lost Forever//Lost Together. 

As you can see, a lot of the problems with rating this album come from its intertextuality. This is an album that is beautiful, dark and emotive but if it is your starting point for listening to Architects much of what it is trying to achieve will be missed. However, even from an outsider’s point of view, it is still a very good album. Lead single ‘Hereafter’ has my favourite riff of 2018 and Sam’s vocal performance, as on most of the record, is better than ever. ‘Royal Beggars’ has a more melodic, Northlane inspired vibe and the incredibly frantic ‘Seventh Circle’ is a burst of pure rage and aggression but taking their style in a completely new direction to their usual breakdowns and song structures. And ultimately it is moments like Seventh Circle that lead me to the one major flaw in this album, which is that outwith the aforementioned songs, this song structure and sound is almost unchanged from the previous record. While this is no bad thing, there’s a reason they are the biggest Metal band in the UK, All Our Gods was very much an iteration rather than a reinvention of the sounds from Lost Forever//Lost Together and Daybreaker - to a lesser extent. Moments of real experimentation show what the band are capable of at their very best, and there are simply not enough of them here for it to be a truly groundbreaking record. I normally would accuse them of playing safe, but I think its more to do with that they didn’t want to tarnish Tom’s legacy, and were proving they could still make music as Architects before moving on to redefine what architects is in later projects. If they still sound the same on the next record, then I will be slightly harsher, but to be honest, the fact we got this album at all is exceptional and I don’t think it would be fair to criticise them for for the most part sticking with what they know best. Which leaves me the conundrum of how to score it. With no context I’d give it a high 7 or an 8, but considering the circumstances I want to give it a high 9 or a 10. Either way, this album is great from front to back, with a few songs showing the pioneering genius that made them the greats that they are. It lives up to Tom’s legacy and leaves fans excited for where the band will go next. And that is the real beauty of the album – it was made as catharsis for the grieving band, even after multiple listens I’m not sure it was really originally intended for us to hear, rather than simply them dealing with their emotions the only way they knew how. The fact that one of the most complete and interesting albums of the year is a form of catharsis from a reeling architects shows just how good they are, and I would urge anyone interested in the album who is completely new, to have a listen to Lost Forever// Lost Together and All Our Gods, then come back to this album and appreciate it for what it is. For the fans, enjoy it. Its not architects at the peak of their powers, but its close enough to remain awe-inspiringly good.

 9/10

Key songs to listen to:

Death is not defeat, Hereafter, Doomsday, Royal Beggers, The Seventh Circle

@CoreLineage on twitter

[maxg-longform]

When The End Began - Silent Planet

There’s so much to dig into with this album that ironically, given the title, I will begin at the end. The closing track, Depths III, encapsulates everything that Silent Planet have been working towards in their previous two records. A moody, atmospheric track that lends itself to Garrett Russell’s unique delivery and his songwriting denser than many essays I’ve turned in.  Garrett’s songwriting is genius, covering topics ranging from the US Opioid epidemic, to Guernica, to homelessness and LGBT identity – and unlike many who try to cover some of these topics, does so with a weight and gravitas that at no time feels like pandering or glibness. With more multisyllabic words than I’ve heard in any other album this year, by a long shot, his half-screamed delivery takes on a rapper-esque flow at some points as he fits his thesis to the rhythm in mind bending ways, giving every line and metaphor its due attention. In the New Eternity:

 Mother, tell me, why do the waters make us sick?

Who bleeds the heavens making the clouds rain pestilence?

Dropping fever, like manna from the morning sky

Gather your children and hold them as they die

 He references Revelation 8:11 while talking about US use of agent orange in the Vietnam war. He portrays the thoughts of an addict in Share the body:

 Do I dare shake the need from our skin?

Do I dare rattle the rust, corroding me from within?

The lechery, the treachery, oh come, Love, sit next to me

This anatomy is built like tragedy

Don't you know me by these scars? These marks where I are?

I mean I am, I mean I was, I was supposed to be someone.

 These are two examples, but I could have picked almost any line from this album, the writing is consistently above and beyond excellent and delivered in an interesting and unique way. Paramount to this are the much more evocative drum patterns from Alex Camarena and these are a big improvement on the previous two records – Everything Was Sound and The Night God Slept – and there are some technical and intriguing riffs from Mitchell Stark on lead guitar, most notably in Visible Unseen, Firstborn and Lower Empire. Even the keyboard pieces add an ominous touch, used sparingly as they are. This is in part because the mixing is much better on previous records, and every aspect of what the band try to do is shown in its best light by that.

 I should admit, I like The Night God Slept and Everything Was Sound, they were ambitious and intriguing, yet they were flawed in several ways, good, but always with the feeling that the band could grow into something more. When The End Began is that more, it is the total realisation of a conceptually and stylistically ground-breaking band at the peak of their powers. It is a flawless execution of a brilliant idea and deserves to be in album of the decade discussions, let alone album of the year discussions. In a year packed with amazing releases, this stands out as something bold – reflective yet arresting – melodic and atmospheric yet heavy where it needs to be and written with an actuarial precision that would make a watchmaker blush. Flawless.

 10/10

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