Album review: Carcer City – The Life We Have Chosen

At its best, metalcore is the quintessence of modernity :  It is music stripped of the tyranny of traditional forms.  Freed from the need for verses, choruses, tunes and lyrics, it is an assembly of musical found objects.  Clumps of ideas in different keys, time signatures, voices and moods thrown together, layered around the odd moshpit-friendly breakdown and wrapped up with a lung-shredding death growl.  The voice of the 21st Century.  A child-like God-Emperor, an infinite Id screaming its unending rage, fear, hatred and despair to the heavens with no expectations of being heard.  Had T. S. Eliot been born in the late 1980s I have no doubt that he would be standing on a dingy stage, clad in a Converge T-shirt roaring incomprehensibly about April being the cruellest month.  Good metalcore is not listened to, it is experienced.

This of course begs the question : Is The Life We Have Chosen – debut album of the Scouse metalcore outfit Carcer City – actually any good?  The answer is Yes.  Very.

As you might expect, Carcer City’s sound is undeniably brutal.  Vocalist Patrick Pinion leads from the front with a wonderfully deep and ragged growl and he is ably supported by a band more than capable of summoning up the requisite rumble-chugging guitars, mad flailing double-pedalled drumming and intense, bruising bass-lines.  However, this is to damn with faint praise as any band identified as metalcore should be able to summon up these elements.  What makes Carcer City an interesting band to listen to is not their capacity for satisfying the demands of their musical genre, but rather what they bring to the genre that is unique and distinctive.  Simply put, this is the starkness and tension of their sound.

The Life We Have Chosen manages to evade both the hair metal influences of melodic metalcore acts like Protest the Hero and the death metal theatricality of deathcore bands such as Whitechapel and Bring Me The Horizon.  Instead, the music of Carcer City is born of a pervasive tension between starkly simple high-pitched melodies delivered by synth or guitar and an ever-evolving but savagely complex patchwork of low-pitched metal vignettes constructed from howling vocals and sludgy, roaring guitars. This contrast is particularly brilliant in the album’s second title track “The Life We Have Chosen (part ii)” where Pinion’s calmly spoken lyrics and starkly beautiful synthesised soundscape collapses into the chaos of a traditional metalcore melange.  Also impressive is “Signals” where an elegantly simple three note melody soars above a veritable sea of aggression, somehow both containing and magnifying the savagery of the song. “Patience Won’t Heal The Broken” reverses the tension and begins as an astonishing collision of different musical vignettes that brutalise the listener’s senses before blossoming into the kind of exquisitely melodic finale that post-hardcore bands frequently aim for but seldom achieve.

This sense of tension not only makes Carcer City’s music wonderful to listen to, it also grants it a real sense of thematic unity.  Indeed, from the eerie cityscapes of the album cover to the bleakly technocratic magnificence of “The Life We Have Chosen (part ii)”, Carcer City’s music seems to exude feelings of urbanised paranoia and alienation.  The pervasive tension between high-pitched simplicity and low-pitched complexity conjures up images of a brutal and brutalised human nature trapped within something sinister, cold and yet beautiful.

If I had to make one criticism of The Life We Have Chosen it is that its breakdowns are perhaps too infrequent and insufficiently catchy to really capture the imagination or fill the moshpit.  In a form of music as non-traditional as metalcore, the absence of these kinds of crowd-pleasing hooks can make listening to a band something of an uphill struggle.  Indeed, Carcer City are not the most accessible of bands.  However, if you look past the simple-mindedness of the moshpit to the music itself you will find in The Life We Have Chosen an album full of intelligence, invention and imagery that not only supports repeated listening but actively demands it.