Having stumbled across Mares of Thrace in 2022,their last album The Exile grabbed my attention with its huge, burly sound and gnarly screams courtesy of frontwoman Thérèse Lanz. Wonderment expands at the discovery that this sonic stampede is wrangled by just two people. Lanz uses a 28-inch hybrid between a bass and a guitar (designed by Converge’s Kurt Ballou), which allows her to play both and neither instrument in a thoroughly unique sound fit to fill the caverns of the listeners mind and soul. Accompanied by Casey Rogers on bass and drums, they manage to channel the fury of at least five regular rip-roaring riff smiths between the two of them.
Three years later The Loss dropped like an anvil from a dark and foreboding cloud bank and proceeded to crush its (un)suspecting audience of masochists in most satisfying manner. It’s not like The Exile pulled many punches, but this one really goes for the throat. This is clearly audible in Lanz’s larynx-lacerating screams, and the way her voice shudders, shatters and is then sutured back together as she delivers an honest and heart-wrenching tale of grief, loss and finding the strength to keep feeling through a calloused heart.
The emotional affectivity of this album is apparent from the first track, which immediately batters the listener with a gnarly blackened sludge opening, before transitioning into a lurching, stanky riff. Mares of Thrace’s initial attempt to ride over the listener roughshod obfuscates the back-hoof kick. That follows in the tracks latter half, which slows down to a plod and then breaks open into one of the more harrowing bits of spoken word delivery in recent memory. Accompanied by subtle drumming, a plaintive guitar riff and soft backing vocals, Mares of Thrace provide a glimmer of hope while galloping across the listeners battered vessel.
Barely offering the time to catch a ragged breath, the album transitions into “The First-Stage: Shock”, a song that verges into sludgy screamo territory and really shows Lanz's unhinged and gorgeously vulnerable vocal prowess. The back half of the song also gives Casey some time in the limelight, as the song transitions into an atavistic tom-heavy drum pattern, paired with a beautifully resonant guitar part, and then once more speeds up and goes for the presumably already choked up throat again. Moving into the album’s mid-section, more excellent musicianship ensues, coupled with some evocative lyrics as far as understandable without a lyric sheet at hand. Graves at Sea comes to mind in the excellent progressive sludge riffing, insofar as Mares of Thrace don’t utterly defy genre classification.
After “The Third Stage: Anger” runs the listener over and leaves them broken in the sludgy mud among its hoofprints, “Disenfranchised Grief” once more shows the incredible power of the bass heavy bottom-end Mares of Thrace bring to bear. The song is mostly instrumental, and serves as a well-placed and paced crossing into the album's second half. “The Fourth Stage: Bargaining” starts lures the listener into a beautifully false sense of security, before once more tightening the reins to full throttle, although with a strong melodic bent to the riffing. At times, it reminds of Light this City’s excellent Terminal Bloom in its mix of cutthroat melodic riffing and the shredding screams of their frontwoman. The track ends on a mournful arrangement, expertly using clean backing vocals.
The last stretch of the album starts with “Complicated Grief”, which might be the least compelling track on the album. The combination of the often merciless nature of this album and its subject matter can lead to some inability to process everything; if there is any space for self-editing on this album it would be here. This slight dip is quickly effaced on “The Fifth Stage: Depression” which is no less brutal in its emotional affectivity, but does slow down and open up where needed to open the throat for a heaving breath here and there before clenching it shut with full on panic chord riffing and then transitioning into a gorgeous guitar and bass interplay underpinned by crystalline, splashy cymbals and keys on the back half of the track, that are subsequently sown into the songs cathartic ending.That catharsis really shows and showstops on the albums last track, and while (largely) instrumental outros can be a dangerous ending to an album as poised for climax as this one, the beautiful and life-affirming outro on not hardening one’s heart in the face of crushing loss ends the album on a much needed note of hope.
There is really very little in the way of criticism to offer here. The album sounds great ears production wise, although (and perhaps this is due to the unconventional stringed instrument Lanz uses), in the speedier passages the lower ends of the sonic spectrum could do with a bit more room to breathe. The album might also benefit from a slightly shorter runtime considering its heft and subject matter, but criticizing good art for its size or length comes with a fair bit of irony. If you’re ready for an emotional stampede that will leave you broken and battered but with some hope of healing, don’t sleep on this album. You might not sleep for some time after either.