Review Summary: future repeats itself
We find out who we are by stumbling into ourselves as though no one else has ever stumbled into themselves before. And when Sleep Talk realised this, they gathered what they knew about the world and each other, and tried rearranging that information into a formation that made sense. They looked both behind and ahead, creating a direct link between memory and the parts of their timeline shrouded in shadow – “pieces of time” from every epoch interacting with each other to inform the present. Hence, a realisation of how one comes of age: having a hyperawareness of the past bleeding into the future. Existing in this space is the only way one can see Everything In Colour. Existing in this space is an epiphany.
“A room full of mirrors / with nothing to see / but the things that have passed / it’s like I’m falling into me.”
There’s something about the way the songs will fracture themselves into different tenses. The way
If I Die will ask for the preservation of memories that haven’t even been made yet signifies a naïve existentialism that will be affecting because it’s so unrefined, so candid. The soaring tremolo and the anthemic hardcore-cum-arena-rock chorus will reflect this, too – the attempt to track every big idea they can will speak of a band that, for better or worse, refuses to resign to any notion of restraint. The way they will write music will mirror their themes: the tendency to ask all-encompassing questions they’re ill-equipped to answer (
”what if the sun swallowed me whole and I don’t get to grow old?”) will be just like how the songs will undercut a section by introducing an unrelated one they were too excited to wait for. These songs will guess where they should go, and only in hindsight will it make sense.
Really, this kind of hardcore music (the kind you thought you’d left behind back when Northlane released
Singularity) is perfect for documenting the understanding that, in the midst of a neverending swirl of days, things are sometimes impossible to understand.
Everything In Colour posits an acceptance of fear and confusion as the model of its bildungsroman, tweaking the melodic hardcore formula into something that benefits from the melodrama that is inherent in the genre. It is True Knowledge Exists In Knowing You Know Nothing: The Album, and it is a documentation of the future repeating itself.
