Seven Blood
Life Is Just A Phase
What’s this—a German post-hardcore / alt-metal band that’s so slick and overblown, they bypass almost all heaviness entirely? Must be a day that ends in Y! The biggest shock is that Arising Empire hasn’t snapped them up yet, though that’s inevitably on the cards. Such is the efficiency and predictability with which Seven Blood operate, though some credit is due—they’re not as bereft of features as they could be.
As wishy-washy as that statement sounds on paper, it becomes even more so when you hear Life Is But A Phase. Its essence is of the superficially big, clear, mid-paced music that’s interchangeable from most of its kin, and also itself. There’s little excitement to be gleaned purely from that anymore, and thus Seven Blood’s uphill struggle is clearly telegraphed. There’s not nothing here, though, as the peritext of vocalist Azaria Nasiri’s parents fleeing Iran during the Islamic Revolution in the ‘70s lends the placelessness of a song like House ≠ Home some of its own individuality. Overall, too, there’s a Dream State-ish quality that’s more go-for-broke in execution, particularly on the album highlight Not Your Misery.
Alas, all of that can only take you so far, which Life Is Just A Phase learns without haste. Regardless of the individual drops of personality you can squeeze from Seven Blood, they’re still a monolith to overall uniformity. The sole instrumental outlier is As We Bleed with the faintest trace of horns in the world; otherwise, it’s business as usual. The album rumbles and roars but without baring its teeth, before Fall From The Sky wraps up as a trundling, uneventful closer, for all its efforts to reach towards a climactic epic. Also, divorced from the context that provides a shred of new light, the writing isn’t the slightest bit special. Shoutout to No Breakout for not only being the unelaborated ‘inner demons’ song that all of these are required to have, but buttressing it in verbiage as underwhelming as “the walls are closing in”.
As a whole, the moments of shine on Life Is Just A Phase pale next to its blank slate of a creative body elsewhere. Seven Blood find themselves in that fugue state of ‘fine, but not exceptional’, which ultimately ends up being useful to no one. This scene is lousy with acts who fit that exact description, and one more that can jump a millimetre or two higher doesn’t warrant a second look. On the bright side, there’s a nailed-on choice for a future opener for Dream State or As Everything Unfolds moving forward. Yay?
For fans of: Dream State, As Everything Unfolds, Future Palace
‘Life Is Just A Phase’ by Seven Blood is out now.
male//gaze
TOO LATE NOW
The descriptor that male//gaze have coined for themselves is ‘extreme pop’, though that doesn’t truly do them justice. Though functionally dichotomised, it’s still a bit reductive considering exactly what’s going on here. On TOO LATE NOW especially, you get the essence of a band whose creative walls have been made deliberately ductile, though not so much that they’ll topple altogether. You’ll also find that not giving too much into experimental wackiness is the cornerstone for male//gaze as a truly compelling act.
What’s noteworthy about TOO LATE NOW is, in its approach to crossover sounds, it’s made work through some very narrow intersections. Of course shoegaze and black-metal have precedence of cooperation, as seen on RETURNING, but it can be more difficult to tessellate with hardcore-punk on GET WELL or especially the screaming electro-clash of SLAYMAXXING. More often than not, though, they do get it to work. It’s a benefit of the washed-out production style that blunts the edges on Ash and Hank’s vocals, without doing away with any bellicose intent. For as much subsidiary garb as their sound is clad in, male//gaze have the stature of a hardcore band at the centre.
Moreover, that’s present enough to stop TOO LATE NOW from succumbing to its own vision’s weight. SLAYMAXXING is the perfect example, where the borderline brat-core aesthetic is basically incongruous with everything around it, but the backbone sure isn’t. Even when it’s directly followed by SPEAK (FOR ME)—six minutes of shoegaze that’s the EP’s most tranquil turn right after its most hyperactive—there’s enough of a throughline to stop it flying off the handle. That’s not nothing to manage, either. What could’ve easily had male//gaze scrabbling to achieve anything from their expanded bag of tricks turns into a relatively-if-not-entirely-cohesive package.
When you consider how their previous album Equally Uncomfortable was almost entirely situated on the shoegaze end, branching out this much and retaining success is no small feat. On that same token, you get the feel of a band hewn from experience on TOO LATE NOW, rather than embarking on a haphazard journey with few plans. male//gaze do give off the energy of a band who started in shoegaze and broadened from there, such is the control and knowledge of sonic threading they exhibit. The next step is to workshop ‘extreme pop’ a bit more, ‘cause surely there’s a name that can do this more justice.
For fans of: Basement, Deafheaven, Title Fight
‘TOO LATE NOW’ by male//gaze is released on 28th November.
Deficit
DEATHSTYLE
That artwork sure is…something, isn’t it? Makes you wonder how much deftness Deficit have when they’re clearly so reluctant to show it at face value. Well, a quick listen to DEATHSTYLE should be enough to assuage any such curiosity. Between a penchant for nu-metal at its most lunkheaded and the deathcore that parlayed into, Deficit are seemingly trying to position themselves as the next coming of Emmure, for all our sins.
To be frank, that’s not a hard thing to do; it’s just something that no one wants. The genuine article has been nosediving into irrelevance for years now, because of a worn-down shtick that was cripplingly limited in the first place. Deficit, then, have the perfect opportunity to try and rehabilitate that laughingstock of a style, and largely don’t. It’s bruiser-core at its most zero-dimensional, where even the party song of a title track is saddled with Nathan Newman’s overly antagonistic delivery and the production’s glassy, spooky Korn-isms. There’s also the mask-slip of insecurity on the opening track SUFFOCATE//DEADWEIGHT that’s Frankie Palmeri-coded to a T. “I’m doing everything I can just to please a crowd,” cries Newman on the chorus, in a state of vulnerability that’s clearly further than he’s willing to go when the crux of the track’s remainder is “You think I ever cared? I never gave a fuck.”
Spectacular creative minds, Deficit are not. Not that that’s a shock, but expectations holding slightly above rapcore’s bin juice shouldn’t be impossible to meet. To their credit, a primal drumming technique on FYA can be impressive, partly because it’s one of the standout parts on this EP. Within the fusion of nu-metal, rap-metal and deathcore, the wiggle room is exceptionally limited, and given how Deficit can struggle to move past the basics of their constituent parts, they hardly come out swinging. Hell, the entire second half of DEATHSTYLE essentially evaporates on impact thanks to how uneventful it feels. And no, the mere act of being a heavied-up version of the early-2000s’ meathead crew doesn’t count as an ‘event’.
By the end, you’re left with the sort of release that’s so ungratifying to hear. It’s tired and tiring in equal measure, and completely incongruous with where any of its sub-genres currently are. Bar some slightly buffed-up production, this could’ve been released in the bad old days of 2010s deathcore without a second look. And it should go without saying that that’s not a corpse worth exhuming. It’s already festering and rotting away, and making an already-repugnant form look even worse; all that Deficit are doing is shooing some flies away.
For fans of: Emmure, BLACKGOLD, King 810
‘DEATHSTYLE’ by Deficit is out now.
Words by Luke Nuttall
