A Life Once Lost have been around for quite a while compared to a lot of bands, which may go some way to explaining the more mature and rounded sound on Iron Gag, their fifth full-length album. (The sleeve art, however – looking as it does like a reject from Exodus’ early days in the tape-trading era – is less easily explained, if less relevant).
To put it another way, A Life Once Lost aren’t just treading over the formulas. While the thrash and hardcore elements of their sound are clear to hear, there’s a distinct Southern metal flavour lurking in some of the riffs on Iron Gag, big fat beefy blues licks played fast and hard. Indeed, the opening track “Firewater Joyride” acts as a false front to the album as a whole, lulling you into a false sense of security.
That illusion is shattered swiftly by “Detest” and the songs that follow it. As Iron Gag progresses, everything bursts open into a savage thrashcore attack with super-shredder fretwork, whammy-bar dive-bombing, taps and trills, harmonic howls and all the tricks of the trade. The guest solo on “Detest” is by than the nigh-legendary Devin Townsend, but he sets a standard for the rest of the material to follow in its own style.
A Life Once Lost are plainly a very technically proficient band, but never at the expense of groove or hooks; Iron Gag is perfect headbanging material, sure, but there’s enough looseness and flex in the rhythms to encourage your feet to move as well – provided you can find a space beyond the seething pit of mutual damage that a live set from A Life Once Lost must surely create.
Leading the charge are the terrifyingly powerful vocals of Bob Meadows: furious bellows and screams, guttural and throaty. Sometimes he’s on the outskirts of nu-metal schizoid jabber territory, at other points sticking closer to the southern metal template, but covering a lot of ground in the process.
Which is the best way to sum up the sound of A Life Once Lost – they’re borrowing liberally from a slew of different styles and sub-genres with little regard for traditional borders and barriers.
Perhaps that’s why Iron Gag is such a refreshing album – so many heavy bands have one trick that they do really well to the exclusion of all others, but A Life Once Lost change styles and tropes at the drop of beat, morphing on the spot like chameleonic fever-dream. This is a band with ideas to burn and the diversity to keep your attention, and Iron Gag is a fine manifesto for them to work from.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: A Life Once Lost, groove metal, hardcore, metal, metalcore, Southern metal, thrash
