Photo: The Hills Have Eyes
Yearning to be embroiled in a tempest of raw energy and intensity? Then the debut album from Dutch trio An Evening With Knives is a date you might not want to miss. Offering seven slabs of raw emotion and muscular confrontation, Serrated tantalises as it imposes with a wall of sound cast from post metal/rock and doom/stoner metal infused with plenty more.
Eindhoven hailing An Evening With Knives made their first potent mark with their self-titled debut EP in the summer of 2015, backing it up with an ever growing live reputation taking in stage shares with the likes of Corrosion Of Conformity, Truckfighters, Elder, and Steak Number Eight. Recorded with Pieter Kloos (Dool, Death Alley, Monomyth, The Devil’s Blood, Motorpsycho), Serrated more than hints at the power and edge which you can only assume empowers their live prowess, consuming ears and attention from the first breath of its opener.
Come Undone instantly dangles guitar bred lures before the listener, their predacious air as rich in the lurking rhythms and overall tone of the track’s entrance. The controlled but gnarly growl of Peer van Grunsven’s bass soon prowls the senses, it too as inviting as it is portentous as it instinctively courts the vocal prowess of guitarist Marco Gelissen. He in turn weaves sonic tendrils, melodic often acidic vines which captivate around the invasive beats of Ivo Jonkers. It is mesmeric stuff, the three conjuring a web of emotive suggestion and biting enterprise with essences of psychedelic rock in its doom and stoner nurtured metallic drama.
Equally intense and enticing shadows crowd together in next up Restless, their union slightly claustrophobic around the raw beacon of melodic temptation. In turn, vocals draw their own lines of lures and investigation, rhythms and grooves gaining greater intensity and weight to greet them. Once more there is a predatory feel to the proposal, the track stalking the senses as it lays down some delicious bait lined with addictive hooks within a post rock climate.
Blind Man’s Guess brings a more primal tone with its presence to wrap its own web of sonic teasing as Gelissen roars , he as potently backed by the equally angst loaded tones of van Grunsven. Each third of the band creates a line of invasive seduction, combining them for a rich and fiery trespass as atmospheric as it is ravenous. Tempestuous throughout even in its calmer moments, the track is a nagging treat with riffs and rhythms walking a fine line between poise and rabidity.
Through the melancholic climate and emotive unrest of Hysteria and the contagious commotion of Fade Out, ears and thoughts were again only sparked into instinctive involvement, as too an already keen appetite for the barbed explorations of Serrated. The first of the two did not grab as fiercely as previous tracks or indeed its successor but left an eagerness for more which the second thickly fed with its waves of repetitious riffs, bone snapping rhythms, and overall through its irresistible infernal harassment. The track is superb, barbarous yet punishingly beautiful as it works on body and imagination with relish and creative predation.
The album concludes with firstly Thoughts and Regrets, a song with a similar and as successful template to the previous triumph, and lastly the heavy doom soaked Drowning in Daybreak. The first unleashes an individual ruction of invasive grooves and turbulent enterprise across heavily barbed rhythms while the second toys with the imagination through its instrumental suggestiveness, the piece a melodic squall which just beguiles.
There are moments within Serrated which you may feel you have heard before or certainly invite references to others but from its first to last breath the album is a rousing and heavily impacting individual leaving an urgent want to brave plenty more of An Evening With Knives.
Serrated is available now through Argonauta Records @ http://www.argonautarecords.com/shop/en/music-/236-an-evening-with-knives-serrated-cd.html
http://www.aneveningwithknives.com/ https://www.facebook.com/aneveningwithknives/
Pete RingMaster 30/01/2018
Copyright RingMaster: MyFreeCopyright
caresses and sonic whispers watching on. Once the bass and throaty guitar enters though a shadow clouds over the tempting to chill and inspire the imagination with stronger potency. Taunts of repetition begin laying down their riveting seeds from this point but through a weave which slowly shifts and evolves as the first of the long winding tracks emerges fully. The song like the album has to be taken and assessed over numerous traverses of its heavy presence, it inducing a stronger persuasion and convincing with each taken endeavour. The droning breath of the track which takes over until the equally dragging vocals steal their moment nag and entice, but equally provide an irritant to fear or crowd in with mentally and emotionally. Though the shortest track on the album at a mere eight minutes it makes the listener work for its rewards, or that may be endure for some, but nevertheless it offers plenty for most to feed eagerly upon.