Feed The Rhino – The Silence (Century Media) 2018
6
From the opening lines of “Mirror, mirror on my fucking wall…” you sense that The Silence could well be a special album, such vitriol is spat in that one single line, and the tone is one of vicious, threatening terror – that you really hold on and hope that it will be as good as that opening sense conveys…
Sadly, it’s not.
A largely by-the numbers UK-hardcore album – which tries hard to escape the trap of falling into generic heaviness, but it lacks invention, intentions and heart. Occasional softening of the heaviness yields interesting results – like in Losing Ground where the music becomes a more soft edged and explorative beast – but then they fall into almost workmanlike riffs, trap themselves in second grade structure and the music becomes sluggish and – unforgivably – really boring.
I had high hopes, I really wanted to love this, but it seems like a lot of this kind of music right now there are no risks taken, no tangential twists into new territory and the music falls into cliché and retreading old ground. It’s a real shame – as clearly they have the stones to build magnificent buildings, but this feels like a favela when it could have been a skyscraper.