Currents ‘The Death We Seek’
Let me start with how you should listen to Currents new album. It deserves your full focus. It deserves the volume to be loud. It deserves you to be blasted in the eardrums song after song like the waves of a tsunami crashing against you.
The Death We Seek is a masterclass on how to combine slabs of riffing, metalcore dynamics, black metal ambience, prog technicality and lyrical vulnerability into a beast of art.
Currents have always had the ability to sing outward about inward issues while making insanely epic tracks. This time the journey is stunningly laid out over ten tracks, each one beautifully demonstrating the bands potency.
Whether it’s the title track The Death We Seek – with spitting lyrics of ‘can you feel it?’ as the song switches dynamics and time changes in fury – or the slower Unfamiliar – which deals with moving into a new phase of life after suffering despair, not knowing what is next – this album is nothing short of lyrically raw and beautifully passionate.
Living In Tragedy has a catchy and pounding dance beat which drives the song through the angst as it pulls you into another realm before being thrown back into that beat and riff as the song finishes on a uplift of ambiance and guitars.
So Alone and Over And Over are brutally exquisite in that the music – crushing riffs and sonic melodies throughout – are matched with the intensity of the vocalist Brian Wille performances of calm and anger singing ‘I have lost the will to fight’.
Beyond This Road has a killer swinging riff during the verses which gets the neck muscles stretching as Wille vocals go everywhere from black metal to harmonies effortlessly.
Vengeance does as it says in the tin and has this beautiful way of slipping between fury and calmness just by introducing a keyboard before the sound of the devil bellows out through the bottom end.
The keyboard ambience is a big part of the albums sound yet in a subtle way, as it compliments what is before it although Gone Astray is a moment for the keyboards to take the lead with the band following and it works brilliantly.
Remember Me is a doomier number which contrasts with Wille softer vocals about navigating through the chaos that is life and the band finish with Guide Us Home which completes the album in a cheerier mood with soaring solos and build up of sound that feels like being squeezed through a pipe before the relief of being released into the world.
I can assure you, once you’ve given this album your full focus, and turned up the volume, you’ll be hitting repeat and repeat and repeat, it’s that good.
Album Review By Iain McCallum
