In the three years since her debut album Internal Incarceration stands for Year of the Knife much on a knife’s edge – but all difficulties seem to come out of nowhere Dust to Dust EP like blown away.
The all-clear can be given without much notice: the Newark band survived shrinking to a quartet after frontman Tyler Mullen left and bassist Madison Watkins took over vocal duties.
still play Year of the Knife phat metal/deathcore with veritable blackened shades – now produced by Taylor Young (God’s Hate, Twitching Tongues), who stages the group’s sound in a rawer and less massively muscular manner than Kurt Ballou, who was last responsible for the recordings. That the mix could exert more pressure and power here and there – a tolerable blemish, the three song outbursts of rage distilled to almost seven minutes.
Ctrl+C rumbles forward, riffing with infernal fury, the hardcore of Nails-School gains a bit of an upper hand in attitude, Watkins nagging delightfully pissed off (although not really showing any handwriting just yet) as the song meanders to a final mosh party – anticipating a fundamental MO in the songwriting.
Victim harassed between bludgeoning tempo drum, headbanging neck muscles and cranking vehemence, one is an extremely competent genre brew, especially when the backing vocals add more coals, but overall also somewhat generically knitted before the slo-mo credits show programmatically again. The final title track turns the punky chase up in its directness with intricate stumbling bursts, and re-concreting the final meters – a bit predictably – with heavy wrecking ball.
„The Dust to Dust EP is a product of everything we’ve been inspired by since our last record.” explains Watkins. “We used the unexpected downtime to focus all of our energy on writing, and wanted to combine our existing sound with these new influences to push our boundaries and make our most pissed songs yet. This EP is an evolution in the direction of our sound while staying true to the core of our inspiration and values.“
She may be right in many respects – but it is also true that the Dust to Dust EP also feels more like the first step of a new band incarnation, which definitely leaves room for optimization potential including explicitly outstanding, lasting accents.
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