Hell Awaits.
Hello, my friends, hope you are keeping safe and well during this chaos. We are spoilt to be receiving many glorious record releases during this lockdown to keep our tired minds and bodies alert and sanitised. We welcome back our Australian cousins Aversions Crown and their new singer, Tyler Miller with a new LP ‘Hell Will Come For Us All’. That’s quite handy actually, instead of me paving my way to hell, I can sit back and wait for it to come and get me. Gosh, that’s a load off my mind.
But first, let us take pleasure in lending our ears to this nine-track strapping young beast of an album, muscular, and capable of moving heaven and earth.
From the offset we have the finger on the pulse lyric ‘create the division that instils a fear of unification’ if the recent unrest around the world has taught us anything, it is this. The all great and powerful don’t want us plebeians to rock the boat, they don’t want their ivory towers smashed, they want their riches for themselves and they have no intention of constructing a just and equal society. To that end, they propel images of hate and violence to the public, who are too blinkered to see beyond this. Of course, people are realising this ploy, the question is how long before we see a real and defining change?
Again in ‘Born In The Gutter’ another unnerving yet blatantly honest insight ‘separate the rich from the ones that have to dig through the trash’, this is a reality for many. The video shows images of famine juxtaposed with gluttony, power, and envy with powerless and weak and for an extra unsavoury flavour, an unhealthy portion of racial inequality. We do not want to be eating at this table folks.
Aversions Crown are one of many artists to throw their political hat into the ring; I know many people say we should keep politics out of music, but as our lives seem irreparably quashed right now, it is reassuring that our idols are using their platform to reach out and help us up. Tyler Miller brings a cleaner, fresher voice to the mix, I love a growler just as much as the next person, but I find his style will attract a wider audience as the range is temperate and accessible.
Our digitally saturated world gets a bashing in ‘Caught In The System’ as we are commanded by social media and maybe this is the ‘Hell Will Come For Us all’ because the toxicity and atrociousness it brings is nothing short of the devils work. The fickle nature of attaining ‘likes’ has imprisoned us and our minds are dependent on who interacts with us online. The supersonic riffery to start ‘Scourge Of Violence’ is a continuation of the no nonsense high end guitars and drum beats that are present here, and as for the ‘bridge of sighs’ interlude at 1.55 my friends, it’s time to let out all that was locked in for so long. The anthem for our times is the ‘Hymn Of Annihilation’ with death grooves and growls galore and the knowledge that ‘the fabric of the universe begins to disintegrate’, we commiserate the end of days with AC at the helm. Our collective ‘Sorrow Never Sleeps’ keeps us awake and you need to ‘open up your mind and free yourself’ but first witness ‘The Final Judgement’ and despair as all it takes is 4.35 to compress the destruction.
Avert your gaze my friends, hell is on the way.
Azra Pathan
Aversions Crown – Hell Will Come For Us All out now via Nuclear Blast.