ALBUM REVIEW: Tyranny Of Distance – Beastwars
New Zealand’s capital city of Wellington (Te Whanganui-a-Tara in Māori) sits at the south western tip of the North Island, right in the heart of the Cook Strait. Since the 1990s Wellington has become famous for being the notably cool creative and cultural capital of New Zealand as well as its administrative centre. With its melting pot of global cultures and thriving music scene it is an inspiring place to be as a musician. New Zealand’s rich musical history is the inspiration behind Wellington sludge metal juggernauts BEASTWARS’s highly anticipated fifth album Tyranny Of Distance.
The original concept behind this album was laid down several years before it came to fruition, Matthew Hyde (vocals) expressed a desire to cover Marlon Williams’s Dark Child, but it wasn’t until 2022 when BEASTWARS were approached to contribute to a SOUNDGARDEN tribute album that they began to truly entertain and eventually pursue the idea. The band were on hiatus as they each faced personal struggles, as a result the idea of creating new, original music was a daunting prospect so they revisited the idea of covering Dark Child.
This led to an exciting and ambitious process of shortlisting the songs, finding out what the inspiration was behind them whilst gaining the artists’ blessings, and deciphering lyrics from long lost recordings. With everything pieced together, Tyranny Of Distance showcases BEASTWARS incredible ability to cover a wide range of artists and genres spanning over 40 years of New Zealand’s musical history. With reimaginings of tracks by THE GORDONS, SUPERETTE, SNAPPER, THE 3Ds and more, Tyranny Of Distance is a powerful, sludgy, riff-laden journey into music history as well as the revival and reinvigoration of a legendary Kiwi sludge beast.
BEASTWARS took an experimental approach to these songs, reworking them and extracting information that could help them push the boundaries of the source material. The result of this is a titanically heavy, grungy and ball-busting riff-fest with a unique twist. It’s uncommon that an album’s worth of songs are rearranged and reimagined in the modern age, but Tyranny Of Distance demonstrates that reimagining songs that you enjoy in your own style can be just as cathartic as writing original songs. With this in mind, lead single Waves is a standout track. BEASTWARS bring in the vocal talents of FUR PATROL’s Julia Deans to add a layer of haunting vocals that evokes the poignancy of the original track whilst also being crushingly heavy and sludgy.
In comparison with the band’s last studio release IV from 2019, Tyranny Of Distance feels electric with a renewed sense of purpose. It feels like BEASTWARS are firing on all cylinders again and creating music with a raw intensity that we haven’t seen in a while. The challenge of adapting these songs into the band’s characteristic, thunderous, trademark style has been the healing they all needed. Every beat of every bar has each member’s blood, sweat and tears poured into it, and the album exudes an indescribably fiery passion that is incredibly infectious and fills you with this feel-good energy.
Tyranny Of Distance opens up with Identity, a bulldozing track that wastes no time in getting down to business. High energy, pummelling riffs, pounding drums and grungy vocals really set the tone for the album. Followed by the aforementioned experimental track Waves, which injects a bit of a industrial metal into the album, with the mechanical, melancholic riff and solid drum groove, this song hits your like a missile with pin point accuracy. Emmanuelle feels more frantic and chaotic, with Hyde’s screeching vocals unleashing what feels like years worth of pain and strife with fervent aggression.
The song that helped this album come to fruition, Dark Child, sits nicely in the middle of the record. Slowing down the pace, it is quite possibly the world’s first sludge ballad. Emotive lyrics, sombre melodies and sludgy riffs make for an emotional listen. Looking For The Sun returns to the Goliath riffing that was established at the beginning of the album. It’s high energy and punky and it gets you up and moving. High And Lonely is an eerie track that builds and bursts into an anthemic sludge epic. We Light Fire follows a similar formula but injects more grunge into it; dark, intense and heavy, it feels like a crushing weight is starting to settle on your shoulders. This feels like the ultimate catharsis of pain. Album closer Spooky delivers the final blow. Like a swinging sledge hammer it finishes a powerful album with one final crushing strike to your eardrums.
Tyranny Of Distance is a brilliant return from one of New Zealand’s heavyweight metal bands. BEASTWARS have reinvented themselves and shown their contemporaries that reimagining the songs that you love from completely different genres into bludgeoning, sludgy, riff-filled reworks is not something you should shy away from as it can be incredibly cathartic.
Rating: 8/10
Tyranny Of Distance is set for release on October 13th via self-release.
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