Employed To Serve
Greyer Than You Remember
Shock Records (Australia)
Release Date: 25 May 2015
Review by Thomas Riley Lanyon
With their Shock Records released debut album, Greyer Than You Remember, young British upstarts, Employed to Serve, have spit out a slab of miserable, nasty post-hardcore that is filled to the brim with confidence and strong, self-assured performances.
Greyer Than You Remember spends the majority of its thirty-minute runtime at full throttle, bombarding the listener beneath a stampede of math-like guitar rhythms, breakneck drumming, and caustic vocal shrieks, courtesy of front woman, Justine Jones. Opening track, Live Without, blasts by in just under a minute, snapping this way and that, dropping a lead brick on the accelerator and then suffering from a bout of amnesia, the album struggling to remember how to hit the breaks.
Not that this is a bad thing.
Employed to Serve could have filled, Greyer Than You Remember, from start to finish with tracks like, Live Without, Threads, and Tower Mouth, and it would’ve remained an exciting thrill ride of vitriol and fury. Listen to the last thirty seconds of Threads and tell me it doesn’t rip. Thankfully, however, Employed to Serve has chosen not to tread the one-dimensional path, and have written tracks like, Bones to Break, As Cold as the Rest, and the title track. All of which serve as highlights and are crucial in the records elevation from good to great.
The title track begins on familiar ground but then the throaty bellow of guitarist, Sammy Urwin, signals a change on the instrumental side of the equation. The frenetic shifting settles into a chugging groove, which quickly descends back into chaos, only this time it’s far more focused, held together by some unsettling, and eerily memorable riffs. Bones to Break serves as the albums biggest single potential, effectively implementing breaks of post-rock atmosphere that build to stunning, climactic peaks of deafening misery. Plucked, melancholic guitar introduces the final track, As Cold as the Rest, which continues as Justine Jones delivers an affecting spoken word piece on the world’s destruction at the hands of the human race. Static builds and builds before decaying into a punishing mid-paced affair, where throat ruining howls and guitar scrapes abound.
Greyer Than You Remember is a sure fire debut from a very promising young band, who on the back of this album are certainly on their way to bigger and better things.
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