Review Summary: And the award for the best album by the band Orchid that isn’t actually an album by the band Orchid goes to…
Echelons aka Unable To Fully Embrace This Happiness do, however, fully embrace their influences … but also not. I adore the playfully off-kilter opening riff of “Pepper & Carraway Seed”, all bubbly and bright and haywire and haphazard and
hopeful. It is, in a manner so obvious as to be glaring, entirely antithetical to the ordinary aesthetic of the early 00s emoviolence that the Austrian collective draw from so readily. It is, also, no accident. This cheeky little moment acts as a delightful (and some might say necessary) counterpart to the otherwise predictable furious-sandpaper-blaring-potato-very-large-explosion leanings of this 17-minute sad boi firestorm. See also the chunky, blackened thrashing of “A Day Off…”, the utterly ballistic blast beats bursting from “The Flat Earth Society…” and the angry Thomas the Tank Engine vibes on “The Journalist” (probs just me idk); I love (and want to hug) every single one of these generous dabs of colour, because they make me smile, and because each adds oodles of character and personality to this otherwise frayed, fading canvas.
The Morning Sun & the End of the World is a lavish love letter (and testament) to just how abrasive, violent and brilliant of a genre screamo can be, and why old, ageing ideas are worth repeating when you’ve got the earnest fucking grit to see it done properly. Almost caricatural in execution: it is the worst produced, most frantic and very good-est project of its kind this side of 2010. The vibrant minds at the helm will be the next big thing in the industry of loud shouty sounds, if and when they ever get around to releasing more music, and if and when we all get around to taking due notice. To that end: fully embrace this album, now.
