2023-05-20 18:25:51
Hat die Emoviolence/ Screamo-Institution Jeromes Dream with The Gray Inbetween may actually still be recording the album you’ve been waiting for since their iconic debut Seeing Means More Than Safety waited?
No. On closer inspection, this is not the case. But why it might seem so at first glance is obvious.
On Presentsthe 2001 one year after Seeing Means More Than Safety published second work by Jeromes Dreamand LP, the (even ridiculed) comeback work of the trio, who only found each other again in 2018 after more than a decade and a half, bassist and singer Jeff Smith finally used a monotonously calling megaphone vocal style, which then – caution, euphemism! – certainly left an ambivalently polarizing impression on the scene.
For The Gray Inbetween Smith now returns to the infernal practice of screaming Seeing Means More Than Safety back – even more consistently than you would expect after the reboot Keep Those Bristles Clean and Closed II along with his partner Commonly, the Other Head With Both Handsthe really furious live shows 2019 as well as now confirmed rumors about a complete (still waiting for its release) vocal re-recording of LP could have dreamed of in his most manic fantasies of aggression.
No, that voice was not shattered by excessive strain in youth: Smith snarls with a hungry vitality, roaring catharsis with blood and sweat, intensely piercing with harsh passion.
Although is The Gray Inbetween So in that respect a return to the open wounds of Jerome’s Dream roots, but a record like the band’s second effort, which now feels like the trio’s actual comeback, would have been unthinkable twenty-two years ago.
On the one hand, this is because Jeromes Dream Take facets from all previous publications and into the DNA of The Gray Inbetween feed in, especially the noise rock of the recent past has left blatant traces: AAEEAA clenches his fists there with sinister pearly chicanery and psychotic muscle flexing; Stretched Invisible from London wears itself down in dissonance with bursts of staccato and poisonous outbursts.
In the second half the record (around the hysterical, DaughterStandard box The Future of Memory, before the closer The Last Water Pearl stamping his stoic staccato hard Touched Amoré-Longing steers, but then lets this scenario fade away relatively unspectacularly) although fundamental a little weaker less outstanding, the most essential has already said, but then it still scrapes math (about On Holiday with Infinity with its tarantula stab escalations of the curved wrecking ball), while individual passages (the short, dreamy breath Cosmos In Season at the ambient washed-out piano; the interlude fetched from afar Often Oceans) can be used alone to never let the attention on the overriding arc of suspense become dull. To that extent The Gray Inbetween certainly the band’s most mature and complete outpouring to date.
On the other hand, this evolution is also due to the change in personnel on the guitar, which acts like kerosene for the conglomerate dynamite: instead of founding member Nick Antonopulous, he is now hired as the second tour guitarist dark hill (etc.) magician Sean Leary fixed part of the structure.
Drummer Erik Ratensperger on the line-up change that came about due to local distances between the original line-up: “We had every intention of including Nick in the process of writing during what became The Gray In Between, but unfortunately, it didn’t work out. And eventually the entire dynamic of the band changed and became evident that the band had entered a new chapter during that time — and this next chapter is comprised of Jeff, Sean and myself. It feels like a new beginning in so many ways. It feels like we’re at the starting line with The Gray In Between.“
If Ratensperger, who himself, does one have to mention it at all?, as with all his drumming, delivers a brilliantly bursting performance, bursting with urgency and dizzying variability, further from a “tender brutality‘ says Leary in the game, he hits the nail on the head. Leary’s work also fits seamlessly into the character of Jeromes Dream spins trademarks further, while at the same time she fans them out in an absolutely individually graceful way: as a whirlwind, atonal attacks taunt like schizoid overarching anxiety states, only to dissolve in the next moment in the most sublime melodic arcs that the trio’s band career has to offer.
Above all, the double from the anthemically rumbling to the grindcore, but then conjuring up a hopeful, uplifting grandeur South by Isolation as well as one patiently simmering the tension Pines on the Hill (with Guests), whose manic eruptions haunt optimistic gestures in the atonal melancholy, turn out brilliantly. And Conversations: In Time, On Mute hammers and whirls with epic edges in the brain rage, but allows itself short phases of complete withdrawal into a calm deep breath, including distinctive drum minimalism. Yes, this album is full of – maybe not iconic, but definitely – scenes that give the genre absolutely memorable, intoxicating (and sometimes a bit monotonously squeaking moments).
And while you’re already raving: Jack Shirley has rarely delivered such an effective production that takes the songwriting to the next level as here. His sound works like an additional adrenaline induction, so damn massive, powerful, full and harassing powerful pushes everything out of the speakers. Where the band seems to be bursting with energy anyway, he also bundles the chaos into a stream beyond nostalgia, which doesn’t care at all about not provoking such an original, style-defining, or even important intensity in perception as it does The Gray In Between In the midst of the Screamo renaissance now underway, it would have taken to be considered groundbreaking once again (or get the round-up between points in the final standings): these 25 minutes are blazing ahead with a guilt-free Sturm und Drang mentality Jeromes Dream co-defined spearheads of the genre, they just don’t quite feel like a renewed classic – even if nothing better could have happened to Emoviolence than this true comeback.
Seen like that The Gray In Between definitely not the album you’ve been looking for Seeing Means More Than Safety has been waiting for – but perhaps an even more interesting alternative to this, in a roundabout way with the door coming into the house.
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