ALBUM REVIEW: Loved By None, Hated By All – Lifesick
The title of the fourth album from LIFESICK tells you everything you need to know about how they feel. Loved By None, Hated By All summarises what they feel is almost a fruitless labour over the past couple of years, grinding themselves to the bone with no reward for their suffering in a thankless music industry. It’s the perfect title to send a message.
Discontent with the music industry isn’t uncommon, in fact the vast majority of people are chewed up and spat back out by it in violent fashion. LIFESICK open their album with that same violence ten fold. Death Wish feels like FRANK CARTER & RATTLESNAKES’ I Hate You rewritten for a more fitting metallic hardcore setting and adjusting its aim. Each synchronised swing at the drumskins and booming bassline feels like a winding punch to the chest — a great first impression.
The rage that they choose to harness isn’t dispelled, even after wishing death upon someone in the first track, if anything it only grows more twisted and ugly in the swaggering Peace Through Superior Firepower, only to be followed by aggressive and swift infighting on Double Cross.
If the record feels hopeless at times, it’s because it is, and if it feels real when you listen to it, again, it’s because it is. That might sound reductive but it’s literal. Everything that is present on the record is pulled from vocalist Simon Shoshan’s notes during particularly hard times with poor mental health.
That sort of authenticity — especially when it concerns the stigma around mental health issues that people can label as depraved or twisted, just because they have never been undermined as a quirk — separates what LIFESICK have created from bands that are angry just for the sake of being angry. There’s so much purpose weighing Loved By None, Hated By All down.
Poems For My Funeral opens with deathcore suited growls only to continue on a doom ridden path. Catharsis hits an all time high for the record during Loved By None’s chorus’ with Shoshan screaming the title amidst double kick drums being nothing short of brutalised. Most importantly, individual tracks don’t get lost in the translation of their unrelenting rage that seems to overgrow itself from the epicentre of Shoshan. They’re all tinged slightly differently, some with glint of a shining blade, some burning red hot, some with a blackness far removed from sanity.
Closing with Straight Jacket, the longest track of the record, is significant. It tells us that this is where LIFESICK plan to stay, locked up inside of a sickening anger for their own safety. This is where they feel most at home, in a domain of perpetual anger.
Rating: 7/10
Love By None, Hated By All is out now via Metal Blade Records.
Like LIFESICK on Facebook.