EP REVIEW: I Reside Where Our Love Died – War Within

Scottish hardcore is absolutely killing it at the moment. DEMONSTRATION OF POWER, DESPIZE, BELOW THE NECK, KAKIHARA, NOTHIN’ BUT ENEMIES – the list goes on and on and now it grows one longer with the addition of Jute City metallic hardcore outfit WAR WITHIN and their debut EP I Reside Where Our Love Died.

As one might glean from the title and artwork for this record, WAR WITHIN have a cool old school sound and aesthetic that harks back to the 90s and early 00s and a time when ‘metalcore’ actually had something to do with both metal and hardcore rather than a lot of what seems to pass for it nowadays. They’re not on The Coming Strife, but they absolutely could be and the fact that drummer Kieran recently suggested that one of the band’s goals is to have a release on that label makes a lot of sense when presented with the four tracks they’ve announced themselves with here.

The constituent parts of I Reside Where Our Love Died will be quite familiar to some listeners then, right down to the use of a spoken part in the opening track which is named after the band themselves. From there the record becomns a flurry of melodeathy riffs, throat-scorched vocals and big chug/panic chord combos – essentially all the building blocks of classic metalcore assembled exactly according to the teachings of pioneers like ARKANGEL and MORNING AGAIN, to name just a couple. Second track For All I Have Witnessed is arguably the highlight, its mammoth double breakdown marking it out as the most obvious choice for a metallic hardcore playlist if you had to limit yourself to just one. But the rest is great too, particularly also the final and title track whose closing gang vocal bellows feel fully geared towards inciting a massive onstage pile-on at the end of a set.

There are a couple of small and relatively common nitpicks, or at least necessary acknowledgements, which are mainly that WAR WITHIN haven’t exactly reinvented anything here – although nor have they pretended to – and that I Reside Where Our Love Died does sound just a little rawer than it might need to – which is of course very forgivable for a debut – but other than that this is an easy sell to anyone who likes it when metalcore and hardcore actually hold hands in the way that they always should. It nails all the essentials in a tight and sensible 14 minutes, and provides a very promising first look at another exciting addition to the stacked ranks of Scottish hardcore.

Rating: 8/10

I Reside Where Our Love Died is set for release on December 15th via self-release.

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