Verse And Radiation
Along The Celestial Ruins
3.9
Synopsis:
A virtually worthless mix of thrash and hardcore awkwardly meeting Southern post rock...
Review:
I signed up for this belated release after reviewing excellent label mates Ganon. ‘Hit or Miss’ is certainly an applicable term here as Verse and Radiation’s debut offering is a nervously bad and forgetful ‘Miss’.
The messy album that is Along The Celestial Ruins in no way conveys the solace and beauty of the album's title, instead the album plies a chaotic and undecided level of caustic noise, grating caterwauling and the odd experimental/ambient element that comes across as the adolescent bastard child of Mastodon, old Isis and underground/unsigned 80's American thrash; an intriguing mix in theory, but far less impressive in practice.
To their credit, the band's ambitious tones do occasionally come together and reach listenable levels as displayed on “Zombies Inherit the Earth”, but otherwise the material is the sort of ADD addled, spastic neo-core, post spazz histrionics (“The Learning Curve is Merging”, “Don’t Wombat Me, Jimmy”, “Black Escape”, “Deathwish 8; Charles Bronson Swings a Pink Hammer”) that annoy all but the most arsty kids. Even with tangible thrash influences (“The Old Man Who Never Laughed”, “Shakespearean Powerhouse”, “Kill Complete”) and various degrees of atmosphere (“House of Incalculable”) or slower drone (“Zombies Inherit the Earth”), the whole affair comes together as a complete mess of ideas randomly thrown together and spouted out by a threesome with no tangible ability to write coherent songs that flow or stick, despite their skills and erstwhile influences.
The nine songs of uneventful noise ultimately encapsulates what can go wrong with modern metal when too many ideas are simply strung together on the premise of creative experimentation and ultimately comes across as undirected, unfocused and unlistenable.
