A Bolt From The Blue
For those who’ve seen Silent Hill, the parts where the machinery whirrs and grinds and the scene changes, this record is the musical version of that. All the way from the USA, our friends Knocked Loose have come to bang a few heads together and offer their take on what life has to offer. Pretty damn miserable for the most of it, but then you get handed tasty treats like this and everything is better all of a sudden. There is someone who speaks for those who can’t or are too beaten down to think they will ever stand up and have a voice.
This album is streamlined; lithesome and comprising an aero-dynamic shape that will cut through all the trappings and cling to your once abandoned, near skeletal frame and reboot you.
With the single out already ‘Trapped In The Grasp Of A Memory’ we have poetry and imagery to stop a stampeding rhinoceros, I mean ‘I drain the beauty that’s left in this world, leaving myself condemned’ we are wading into the beastly side of the tracks and we find ourselves ‘alone in a room full of eyes’, sending happy shivers down your spine.
Emma Boster (Dying Wish) makes a guest appearance on ‘A Serpent’s Touch’, the first of two featured artists. it’s great to hear two artists perform, whatever their forte, you hear the effort, the uniqueness of what each has to offer, and it all fits snugly.
I don’t know why but ‘By The Grave’ has my favourite lyric ‘but I found the strength to finally leave’ it is spooky, it is telling and extremely powerful. The second guest is Keith Buckley (Every Time I Die) adding his tender touch on ’Forget Your Name’, enhancing without infringing the creative process.
‘Guided By The Moon’ contains the album title and the lyric ‘I have a bone to pick with death’, somehow, I think we all do. More words of wisdom in ‘Mistakes Like Fractures’ as our friend implores ‘God fell silent when I cried out’, surely a feeling that will tear through the hearts of many. As we traverse ‘Road 23’ we have a pledge, or a plea perhaps that ‘Everything will change’ but maybe too much water has passed under the bridge for any real chance of reparation. The mournful and eerie resonance of ‘And Still I Wander South’ further prolongs the gradual but painful ending we have all familiarised ourselves with. Death being the only valid option we are cut to the quick to discover we have been ‘betrayed by the promise of death’. What sorcery is this, my friends?
Celebrating the old school thrash era with the more modern metalcore genre, this is a neat little record that is music to my ears.
Crash positions please, impact is imminent!
Knocked Loose – A Different Shade Of Blue out now via Pure Noise Records