ALBUM REVIEW: The Language of Injury – ITHACA
After something of a renaissance for alternative music over the last few years, starting off 2019 in a similar vein was never going to be an easy task. One of the bands taking on the challenge however are ITHACA, whose debut full-length The Language of Injury comes crashing into the New Year with nods to the past but eyes fixed firmly on the future to help shape the continuing evolution of heavy music.
Opening track New Covenant immediately lets you know what kind of experience you’re in for – face-melting riffs co-existing alongside a venomous vocal delivery, all neatly tied together with a mad-scientist type feel that evokes extremely fond memories of THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN.
Sounding at times like the glorious love child of PALM READER and ROLO TOMASSI, ITHACA still manage to put their own unique spin on metallic hardcore by throwing a tonne of ideas into the melting pot, and the best news for all of us is that the vast majority of them work absolutely perfectly. Secretspace in particular expertly nails the stark contrast between beauty and pain; vocals that rip your heart strings to pieces embedded in amongst a furious maelstrom of barely-controlled aural chaos.
Some of the most intriguing moments on this record occur when the music is allowed to venture into slightly more off-piste territories, with the guitar flourishes at the end of Impulse Crush for example allowing you to briefly drift off into the aether before being yanked back into the real world with a savage, almost reckless abandon.
None of these tracks outstay their welcome either, and the running order has been so meticulously crafted that this feels like a real piece of art as opposed to a simple collection of songs. An atmospheric instrumental interlude, often the downfall of an otherwise top tier album, breaks up the record just enough to allow you time to catch your breath without completely removing you from the savage environment you’ve been living in for the past 15 minutes.
Title track The Language of Injury soon restores normality by bringing back the trademark hardcore sound and seemingly filtering it through a box of rusty nails. Youth vs Wisdom is arguably the most straight-ahead hardcore track on the record, yet it still manages to cram in a whole host of twist and turns into its 105 second runtime.
In contrast to this flurry of fist-flailing violence, album closer Better Abuse takes advantage of being the longest track on the record by upping the grandeur and the ambition; sweeping guitars acting as a haunting backdrop while the rest of the band hit full stride to create a brutally heavy assault on the senses.
At a time when Holy Roar Records are the bastions for interesting, inventive and innovative heavy music in the UK, ITHACA manage to set themselves apart from their contemporaries by cherry-picking elements from the whole roster and weaving together the strands to form an ever-changing yet always coherent blast of aggression, serenity and sky-high quality.
The future for ITHACA is very bright indeed, and at a time when the likes of EMPLOYED TO SERVE, CONJURER and the aforementioned PALM READER are starting to make the world sit up and take notice, there’s no reason why this record can’t act as the springboard for another special band to emerge as a real force in the British scene.
Rating: 9/10
The Language of Injury is set for release on February 1st via Holy Roar Records.
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