Review Summary: Hanging in the balance.
Some emotions are relatively easy to convey in music. Happiness, sadness and anger are all, without downplaying their effect, easily done. However, some emotions are slightly more difficult to tread. In the case of British act Landscapes, their overarching theme of their music is misery.
Modern Earth shows this through a careful, precarious balance of atmosphere and heaviness. Taking cues from other melodic hardcore bands such as Modern Life is War and Have Heart, Landscapes carve a path between serenity and brutality.
Opening with a looming instrumental intro in the form of “Mouths of Decadence”, Landscapes waste no time in setting the album’s tone as it hurls into “Observer”. The instrumentation forms a doomy, lingering mood, managing to soar whilst simultaneously hitting hard and heavy. The band’s vocalist Shaun Milton passionately screams a monologue of desolation: “from the day I was born I've been waiting to die/hung from the neck by the years spent wasted”. From the get-go, the listener can already see the balancing act that Landscapes play in much of their music.
This is how much of
Modern Earth continues. That’s not to say that the band don’t experiment to some degree however. “Death After Life”, the track that immediately precedes the opener, offers a chorus that is very hooky by the band’s standards, and “Remorser” utilises an even moodier instrumentation than before, one which wouldn’t feel out of place on a Balance and Composure album, over a softly delivered spoken word segment. Later on in the album, “Radiance” kickstarts into life and provides a change in pace. But for the most part, Landscapes stick to their guns and deliver song after song encompassed in anguished atmosphere. “Neighbourhood”, the album’s lead single, acts as a perfect microcosm of
Modern Earth as a whole; towering melodies partnered with vocals that hang between crooning and barking.
The downside of this approach is that the album starts to feel samey and one-dimensional, no matter how emotionally charged the songs may be. At a relatively modest 31 minutes, several of the tracks can also fail to make any kind of meaningful impact on the listener. That said, the band do what they do well, and
Modern Earth is far from not being a worthwhile listen. Although Landscapes fail to create anything particularly varied, they still offer a fresh breath of air from much of the UK hardcore scene in their raw emotions and atmosphere.
