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Sunlight’s Bane – The Blackest Volume: Like All The Earth Was Buried

Blackened hardcore is the pumpkin spiced coffee of extreme music. It’s seasonal and has become evocative of a movement, much like the over priced, sickly sweet beverage. Unfortunately, much

8 years ago

Blackened hardcore is the pumpkin spiced coffee of extreme music. It’s seasonal and has become evocative of a movement, much like the over priced, sickly sweet beverage. Unfortunately, much like coffee fanatics, extreme music nuts don’t all band round blackened hardcore with the gusto they might display for say, post black metal. “It’s too obvious”, “it’s too derivative”, they may cry. Well, fuck ’em. If one cannot appreciate a twisted, cutting dose of blasts and low register riffs then one can go fornicate with their own damn self. And so there is Sunlight’s Bane: the antidote for seasonal commercialism and everything else probably wrong with the world.

The Blackest Volume: Like All The Earth Was Buried (I’m not writing that every time, sorry not sorry) has to bring the rush of a debut record into a scene scattered with a veritable butt load of bands all trying the black vibe, blast and beatdown heavy scene. No easy task. It’s a fantastic time for this kind very particular kind of music if one know wheres to look. That’s why TBV:LATEWB (copy paste, thank you very much) gets the nod. It has the rush of the debut record, it has the refreshing takes on the classic structures and it has, well, this sort of breaks the rule of three but it has a middle section that plods.

Not to take anything from Sunlight’s Bane in the delivery of the material. The riffs are hard and the vocal performance is so varied and gut wrenching that it should score every waking nightmare; great delivery on all accounts, but those few mid-album tracks kill the momentum. Not dead, just suffering at the hands of the mid tempo mafia. Maybe that’s the point though. Who knows. The artist is the one responsible at the end of the day and this is just one opinion from one asshole from one part of the world. It’s all fucked. A notion that the opening salvo and final barrage of TBV:LATEWB grasps, grinds and garrotes with a most vulgar display of clinical violence. Yeah, this is still a damn good one. It’s just a bit long, aight?

Chainsaw guitars, tempo changes, two step and d-beats.. It’s endless. All the favourite pieces of the crusty, endless black shit, piss spewing hardcore trend skippers. Sunlight’s Bane crank the black metal up, too, ushering in disgusting Nordic blasts and piercing chords; the black metal ones that instantly turn a song into black metal, everyone knows what they sound like. Grim. Grind without ever getting too jittery. Getting hardcore kids into black metal and vice versa. Maybe. That’s a big ask. It’s probably worth putting some coinage on this lot though. They’ve got serious salt and serious shit to say. Helps when it’s backed by a well layered wall of a gurgling, scratchy bass and guitar tone twisted into diamond and back to shit. It’s so dense it could and probably should cause panic in more nervous listeners.

This isn’t a fucking pumpkin spiced coffee. That part at the start was a trick. Blackened hardcore isn’t seasonal. It doesn’t come and go like autumn or winter. It’s miserable and violent and brimming with energy all year round. The Blackest Volume: Like All The Earth Was Buried is miserable and violent brimming with energy too. Sunlight’s Bane strap on their seething masks and bare their scything strings and teeth with only one delay to play. The best bits of this new genre get a run out here. It’s a good time for those not looking to ever really have a good time.

Like All the Earth Was Buried will see release on February 17th, 2017 via Innerstrength Records. You can head over to their page to snag it closer to the date.

Matt MacLennan

Published 8 years ago