It can’t just be me, can it?
It can’t just be me that sits there, looking out of the window at the moribund, the bleak, the tedious. And wonders what the point is?
Ok, not every day. Just work days. And you wonder how it all came to this. How your personal life ended up the way it did, how you ended up in the same job for decades and how it all got so entrenched.
Then, right then. You have got your headphones on at work. You don’t think you are technically meant to have your iPod on, but no one has told you to stop beyond “Thorley, you can’t just sit with your headphones on, get involved in the banter…….” (do I sound like a banter type of bloke?) so you do, and all of a sudden, the first line hits you:
“I am just a sad man chasing his sad dreams…..”
Right, ok, lets go. This is the fella.
Now, to be honest, at this point – and I will take you out of my personal hell now – I noticed that this song was track five of this six tracker. It’s called “Courage” and Kial Churcher does scream this line. To be fair, there’s a better one in the chorus too. “A holy man puts his faith in god” he offers. “God doesn’t listen, God just lets him rot.”
If lyrically that sort of tells you what is on “Loss” then musically? Well that’s best shown by the fact that Liam Cornier is on “Still Breaks My Heart”. Cancer Bats’ singer (and a word too for his mighty album with Axewound, but I digress) and aggressive lyrics, this is modern hardcore, this is modern metal (although there is a tinge or two of Sikth here too, in the clever rhythms).
And in truth, its way, way heavier than I usually review. But, after hearing “Courage” and having it speak to me on that particularly bleak day of my existence, I went back to the start, and this EP really has something better than their most obvious peers.
It has a laser guided precision as well as concrete block to the face. “Gemini” is like a slab of riffing, but the wordplay (“I set this world on fire just to keep myself warm”) is straight from the punk rock sloganeering that I’ve always loved.
Charlie Bishop’s guitar is brilliant throughout, and the way he delivers “Imposter” rather suggests there is nothing fake about this lot at all. “Guilt” crushes, and you can imagine this laying waste to any venue they get to play it in. Moshpits were made of this, and there is a roar here that you can’t ignore, and “Loss” which ends it, is probably the heaviest of the lot. “This is what loss feels like” growls Churcher, and there is a sense of spiralling desolation throughout.
Whether Msry are leading the new brigade and all those clichés that I am meant to say at the end of the review, I honestly don’t know (and won’t pretend I do, because Msry deserve better than empty platitudes), because by and large this isn’t a world I am in too often, but every now and again something comes along that makes a connection and is too good to ignore. That is “Loss” and it is brilliant.
Rating 8.5/10
