Album Review: Skyharbor – Blinding White Noise: Illusion & Chaos

For a landmass as vast as India, a country with over 1 billion people living in it, the number of times you come across one of their metal bands isn’t all that often but there is now a rapidly-growing scene. The furore surrounding New Delhi’s Skyharbor is indication that the world stage is primed and ready for the floodgates to open. Why Skyharbor have been one of their breakthrough acts isn’t clear, but their global sound and the fact they have sunk their teeth into such a vogue genre must be factors.

Nailing a worldwide release for their double-disc debut album, Blinding White Noise: Illusion & Chaos, can’t have been the smoothest of rides (“four years of epiphanies and disappointments” according to brainchild/guitarist Keshav Dar) but it’s easy to see how they got there in the end when you see which label they are gracing (Basick) or cast your eyes down the number of international guest appearances. Also bear in mind that these contributions are from guys who offered their help, not vice-versa. Guys like ex-TesseracT vocalist Dan Tompkins, whose pin-point tone is so obviously the key to the Skyharbor door-lock and consequently ends up singing on 80% of the album, and guys like ex-Megadeth axeman Marty Friedman who contributes to two tracks.

The majority of the content is made up by the Illusion disc and, honestly, it’s a delight to finally hear a modern progressive metal record that is happy to dip its toes in the waters of djent, but doesn’t feel the need to obstruct the flow of the songs with incessant levels of palm-muted hammering or flood you with wave upon wave of ambient wash. The band has allowed for a very organic writing process. Left unencumbered by heavy-handedness or complex mathematics the natural rhythms are left to flow and create instantly recognisable patterns. The production has followed suit and swapped hard, angular tones for a softened, more emotive backline that has put the vocal upfront and undominated. “Dots” is a straight-up joy, “Catharsis” is a brilliantly-layered puzzle with an undemanding solution, and “Celestial” burns with unambiguous, anthemic ambition (listen out for Friedman’s blistered, falling riff and Amogh Symphony’s Vishal J. Singh’s quixotic solo).

Any pent up anger that comes from holding back their instincts is released within the howling confines of Chaos. The band rip into the music with vigour, winding up the pace of their attack and rolling around in distortion and syncopation like pigs in muck. Sunneith Ravankar (Bhayanak Maut) is let loose to roar almost continuously through “Trayus” and “Aphasia”, but it is the split-personalities of “Insurrection” which invigorate the most as, like a spinning compass, the befuddling rhythm finally settles on a direction, both in its more turbulent and calmer guises. Throughout Chaos you get the sense that the heart of the album is still there, latent in the background, desperately fighting to burst through the surface as and when it can. And yet I am left with mixed-feelings about this segue into crushing heaviness. There are several bands who have mastered this kind of polyrhythmic, invasive bedlam already, so whilst it provides a deathly foil for the life-giving properties of it’s sister disc, to some extent it feels a little like the band are laying out their abilities to merely impress; an over-exaggerated evil, perhaps?

Illusion is far more beguiling and there is one particular work of art that sums up everything that is brilliant about Blinding White Noise. With intertwined rough and smooth layering pouring like colors out of “Maeva”, it’s a composition that, whilst forming just one more mountain top in a rolling range of peaks, is a piece of music that seems to transcend faceless labels. You simply couldn’t get away with calling it a “track” or a “song” without doing it an injustice, so I haven’t. At its core lies a series of spine-tingling change-ups that provide the platform for Tompkins to soak us in gloriously sweet emotion. His magnificent tone and eloquent words seem such a fitting place to end this review, so I’ll hand you over to him… “It’s so damn hard to let go / But take a chance / And survive, come together, embrace life / This is India!”

Also online @ The NewReview

Album Review: Full Blown Chaos - Full Blown Chaos

The day I saw NYHC outfit Full Blown Chaos hit Peterborough, England and heard Ray Mazzola ask the audience to turn to the person next to them and punch them full in the face, was the day I understood just how wide the yawning divide between hearing a recorded album and seeing the band perform that same said album live could really be. They were the second of four bands on that day, hardly a position of strength, but they exhilaratingly stole the show by a country mile, leaving a messy trail of testosterone in their wake.

Mazzola has said of the band’s live efforts – “You need to be in everyone’s face and make them remember you, whether they like it or not.” An ethic that makes sense having witnessed it first hand but, away from the venue, the album they were touring that day, Heavy Lies The Crown, amounted to tight, uber-aggressive, yet essentially generic metalcore. So, when I learned about this latest self-titled release and the fact they’d added another guitarist, I began to hope that they’d really had a crack at recreating their live show; had perhaps dredged up a chunk of music that would separate them from their peers.

The first few bars do prove promising and are a lumbering feast of chugged guitar and biting snare, harder and heavier than we’ve heard the band produce previously, but this soon falls away into boorish gang chants housed within short, smooth attacks. The lyrics are a combination of hate-fueled jibes and pointed, moralistic observations – “Why are your words so full of shit, you’re not the first to lie to my face” (from “Villains”), “Our values are running away, this is the process of decay” (from “The Walking Dead”), “Don’t you ever shut the fuck up?” (from “Gutter Mouth”), and “As of right now I don’t know who you are, what have you become, you’ve fallen so far” (from “Gravedigger”).

This band are kings when it comes to concocting big, meaty chunks of rollicking hardcore; music that grinds its way down to the snapping point where the rhythmic artillery disintegrates into heavy-as-hell, double-kicking, slow-motion breakdowns that chew you up and spit you back out into real time. FBC are a righteous Chimaira; Madball on steroids. The tracks do dip in and out of rockier and thrashier sections, but you have to pay attention to what’s being brewed up in the smothered background thrum to spot them – “Rise + Conquer” diligently inserts gaps and chants to soften the impact of the macerator vocal, whilst “Silence Is Golden” emits a rippling Trivium-esque riff which eventually dissipates into a flamboyant solo – the former raises hairs on your neck; the latter stands out like a poodle at a bulldog convention and makes you briefly wish they’d followed their own title’s advice. As for the thrash, “Battle Hymns And Broken Bones” is almost reminiscent of Austrian Death Machine, albeit without the necessary tongue-in-cheek.

As a complete work, it’s all a bit similar and over-familiar. The tracks that do standout are few and far between. “The Walking Dead” and “War Machine” are Full Blown Chaos on maximum – an auditory sea of fists and a firm thumbs up to those who’ve stayed faithful to the cause – and “Cain Marko”, which has a devilish triple (quadruple, if you count the split chorus timings) breakdown finale to mark it out. Essentially though, this isn’t much of a step away from their previous release and, I fear, will all too easily be left lagging behind the Hatebreeds and Unearths of this world.

By all means, do have a go at spinning their CD in numerous locations and at ever-increasing volume levels (as I did with their last release), but you will seriously need to haul ass to an FBC show to fully understand the real impact that this collection of songs can have on you. Mosh gloves are an absolute necessity.

Also online @ The NewReview = http://thenewreview.net/reviews/full-blown-chaos-full-blown-chaos