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Well I was going to review this when the vinyl arrived on my doorstep, but Royal Mail being Royal Mail they didn’t deliver it and instead sent it back to the black hole that is their ‘national sorting office’ from which I will probably never get it back. Guess it’s a good thing Holy Roar are a nice record label and send you digital copies of an album when you pre-order it.
Mourning After is the latest offering from the rising stars of British Metalcore that are Last Witness (no they don’t sound like Bullet’. At eight relatively short tracks it isn’t exactly an odyssey but it also means there isn’t a shred of fat on the thing. Every track is a finely tuned machine, there are no extended jams or thirty second interludes between songs, this is an album that’s sole purpose is to punch you between the eyes with its big, knuckle duster sporting fist.
Of course, just because something is heavy as lead and more in your face than a hungry tiger doesn’t mean it has to be formulaic or boring, yet a lot of bands fall into the trap of going the extra mile to make their music ‘brutal’ only to then forget to include variety between songs.
Last Witness haven’t quite fallen into that particular trap but they do have one foot dangling over it. At its best Mourning After offers up some real head banging classics such as ‘The Void’ and ‘Pan-Am Smile’, both crushingly heavy, angry and catchy to boot. However on some tracks it feels as if, having found a good formula, the band are trying to replicate it too hard without broadening their horizons in terms of song structure and tone. The albums latter half falls foul of that especially.
However don’t think that Mourning After is a bad record, it really isn’t. It just perhaps isn’t as good as you feel it could have been. While I still rate it highly I don’t think it’s something I’m still going to have on heavy rotation in a months’ time. But you couldn’t do a lot worse as a fan of the genre than grabbing yourself a copy and making up your own mind.
Patchx
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