The Greatest Of Lost Arts is a defiantly bombastic and self-challenging title for any album, but I can’t help feeling that Lower Definition should perhaps have used the track title “The Ocean, The Beast!” instead, as it more accurately describes their fluid songwriting style.
While billed as a post-hardcore band – which by this point is almost as bankrupt a catch-all as “rock” or “pop” - Lower Definition are pushing hard at the boundaries of their field, and that alone makes them stand out from many of their contemporaries. The Greatest Of All Lost Arts is certainly rooted in the post-hardcore approach, defiant of obvious structures and simple melodies, but at times it leans back towards a purer form of hardcore, or threatens to converge with metalcore and progressive in some as yet unlabelled no-man’s-land.
What unifies Lower Definition’s sound is a pervasive sense of atmospherics, much emphasised by the accomplished movement of the songs from delicate melody and texture to vein-popping bludgeon and back again, the changes introduced so carefully that you hardly notice them happening: a few bars of staccato breakdown or a brace of almost-clean chords, and all of a sudden you’re in a different sonic space entirely.
In this, The Greatest Of All Lost Arts can’t help but remind me of Circa Survive. Very occasionally you’d be forgiven for thinking Lower Definition were cribbing from them directly - “The Choreographer”, especially, is bursting with understated filigree and detail – but the similarity is more in the approach than the sound itself. Circa Survive never use the furious beatdowns that Lower Definition deploy so effectively, for instance, but both bands are masters of contrast.
The most typical manifestation of contrast is the standard post-hardcore good cop/bad cop vocal style, but on The Greatest Of All Lost Arts it’s not such a quotidian gesture. Matt Geise’s angsty clean-sung vocals are unusually convincing and low on self-pity (not to mention being vaguely reminiscent of a young Mike Patton in Faith No More’s early years), and are miles more distinctive than his by-the-numbers roaring in the choruses and breakdowns. But as with the instrumentation, the transitions never feel forced or gratuitous – Lower Definition have successfully integrated a cliché and made it work in their favour.
But The Greatest Of All Lost Arts is really all about the interstitial moments, the spaces in between the familiar where new and marginal things can happen. For example, just as “His Silent Film” sounds as if it is about to collapse in on itself in a clatter of chaos, it miraculously opens out into a delicate and haunting mid-section of echoing clean guitars and close-mic vocals. Lower Definition hide a hint toward this creative approach in the lyrics to “The Weatherman”:
“you’re an artist / when you tear things apart… ”
Lower Definition are tearing at the rulebook, but they’re taking it one page at a time rather than trying to eviscerate an entire phone directory at once. And it’s paying off; perhaps The Greatest Of All Lost Arts is standing out from the crowd while keeping your place in it.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: Lower Definition, metalcore, post-hardcore, progressive, The Greatest Of All Lost Arts
