If music is a journey, then taking a trip with The Arusha Accord could well see you sat in A&E in the early hours of the morning with a serious case of whiplash. The Nightmares of the Ocean EP packs more high-speed swerves and chicanes into five surprisingly brisk tracks of progressive post-hardcore than a lot of bands seem to manage in an entire album.
The Arusha Accord don’t mess around with long gradual intros. The Nightmares of the Ocean EP steps on the accelerator right from the outset, catapulting you into the jagged spasms of “The New Face Of Revenge”, a track powered by staccato chords and inhumanly precise drumming. The yin-yang of post-hardcore manifests itself in style-switching vocals that leap from torn-throat howls and screeches to soaring melodic lines and muttered asides, as well as in sudden yet perfectly executed transitions from spazz-out shred attacks to glistening passages of sinuous bass and glassy abstract scalar runs on the guitar. The track weighs in at just under five minutes long, but it seems to pass far more quickly than that.
Indeed, the whole of the Nightmares of the Ocean EP flies past like a decaying city beyond the rattling windows of a fast car. Think about how, travelling through a vast city like London, you flash through regions of affluent beauty and grinding poverty and decline within minutes of each other; this is The Arusha Accord’s route, and you’re along for the ride with no knowledge of your final destination. It’s simultaneously fascinating and terrifying, like getting into an unmarked minicab at 4am with a driver who speaks no English and has a suspicious array of blackened glass pipes in the side-pockets.
What sets The Arusha Accord aside from many of their contemporaries is their ability to make each song sound distinct by adjusting the blend of light and dark and stirring vigorously. For example, “Solstice” leans more toward the comparatively familiar architecture of metallic post-hardcore, whereas the EP’s title track “Nightmares of the Ocean” could be mistaken for Manchester’s prog geniuses Oceansize cranking everything up to eleven and exorcising a few years worth of frustration and fury into a four-minute riot.
“Night Of The Long Knives” is a disappointing finish for the Nightmares of the Ocean EP, not due to any paucity of quality in the song itself but because, on my review copy at least, the production is notably more woolly and lo-fi than its four predecessors. Perhaps the production run will solve this issue, because it would be a shame to see a genuinely exciting progressive hardcore record marred by a blunder in the finishing process - The Arusha Accord deserve better than that.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: hardcore, metal, metalcore, Nightmares of the Ocean EP, post-hardcore, progressive, The Arusha Accord
July 19th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
The last track on this EP is labelled as a ‘bonus demo track’ so i would have though that the production would have been more woolly considering it ia a work in progress, all the other comments on this EP hit the nail on the head however.
July 20th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
That would explain it, yes - my review copy didn’t come with sleeve art and so forth, so all I got was the track titles. Still a laudable record, though.