Band: Unyielding Love
Release: 'The Sweat of Augury' EP (2016)
Threatening, unruly and haunting are terms often thrown at the feet of extreme noisemakers - and this persistent usage sometimes leaves such descriptors jaded and stripped of potency. Similarly, tying descriptions and genre labelling to Belfast's Unyielding Love, once they've been truly experienced, seems not only difficult, but also unjust and lazy, such is the enigmatic faculty they wield so effortlessly.
While comparisons to Dendritic Arbor
and Discordance Axis most definitely set the scene (and while these
bands have more 'going on' upstairs than simply their combined tumult),
Unyielding Love are gifted/cursed with the ability to present an all too
tangible, turbulent reaction to anxiety, illness and restlessness that
makes 'The Sweat of Augury' one of the finest releases of 2016.
Much
like their literally blood-, sweat- and sparks-filled live expressions,
'The Sweat...' is a taught, unnerving, blackened grinding bellow of
striking viciousness that is wholly professional and refined beyond the
band's active years. Despite the harshness and direct aggression of
their marvellous racket - essentially grindcore with equal parts
hardcore and grating noise elements - Unyielding Love's final product is
less straightforward.
With traces of black metal and the
murkier, discordant recesses of concurrent death metal atop their yield,
as well as the use of noise as an integral component in proceedings,
this EP could almost be the perfect sonic accompaniment to Full of
Hell's 2014 collaboration with Merzbow were it not for those traces of
uneasiness that has it stray closer to the bleak brilliance of Column
of Heaven.
Indeed, this surely is an act that's
threatening, unruly and haunting - in the most real sense - but its
violence is pointed inward, directed at notions of the self and the
brutal truth of human frailty, especially when faced with the twin
grimaces of mental and physical illness. Yet none of this appears
superficial or contrived. The band's addressing of these topics is
fresh, real and utterly personal, and as much as their live contortions
are nothing short of spectacle, they are cathartic episodes for
themselves alone; the audiences just happen to bear witness.
For
Unyielding Love, 'The Sweat...' is a distilled purging, if only for its
brief duration. The quartet exist now as a band very much of their time
with releases that have bottled contemporary discontent - something
never in short supply on the Emerald Isle. This lyrically strong, more
sombre (and interesting) aural treatment of human nature sidesteps the
adolescent, soapbox weltpolitik that often litters the (safe) spaces
occupied by grind and hardcore and thus works to catapult the band into
auspicious realms.
Rating: 90%
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