I always approach these band names that comprise of several words condensed down to one with great caution. They quite often have an ‘x’ bordering each side of the moniker but this one did not, it just had an angry, brooding, sky which looks like a giant bruise with things flying about flung out from within it. You know what? That’s exactly what the music of Asidefromaday feels like. This is battering and relentless, akin to a weathered browbeaten old building that has the wind chipping bits off it but stands there hanging on with determination. There’s no one to rebuild or strengthen its fortifications, the land around it is barren, long since abandoned and it is completely desolate but it is still going to be here clinging on a century down the line, the elements will not remove it and nothing short of a nuclear war is going to make this budge.
Having sat through this for a few times and having weathered the storm through to the end of the 9 minute title track I feel somewhat redeemed, sure I have taken a battering but I feel all the better for it. Indeed the cleaning of the living room which I have been putting off for ages has been done. I feel like playing it again.
Having come via Jona Nido of The Ocean it was evident that this was not going to be something to be taken without the utmost seriousness and this French ‘postcore’ band build up one meaty, hefty wall of sound over these seven tracks. The soundscapes are easy to lose yourself in and their clamour is accentuated by the constant guitar and bass chug and battering muscular drum sound one would expect. The weathered (we keep coming back to that, excuse the Englishness) distempered roar of vocalist Fred Nivard accentuate the storm perfectly but there is another element about this that made it stand out for me and that is the eerie background keyboard textures courtesy of Sebastein Descamps. They add to the other claustrophobic welter of sound and expand it outward from the eye of the storm. There is a real maudlin flow to them and it is dismal and sombre and I find myself concentrating on it weaving away from the coruscating cleave of numbers like ‘Death, Ruin And Corpses.’ In fact perhaps it is the corpse whereas the other instruments are the death and vocals the ruin.
It’s a heady album and it hits the mark. I am not even going to bother comparing it to all the other bands writers normally touch upon in reviewing this sort of music Asidefromaday stand up in their own right and I bet they are flattening live. Dragged through a hedge backwards of an album, I approve.
(7.5/10 Pete Woods)
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