Hundred Year Old Man

BREACHING GIZEH /WOLVES & VIBRANCY

NORTH-ENGLAND POST-METALLERS MIX ATMOSPHERE AND AGGRESSION

Combining a high concept with a punishing low end makes for a stirring combination on this Leeds six-piece’s debut album. Building upon last year’s understatedly profound Rei EP, Breaching’s spoken-word passages and field recordings give calmer passages an elegant profundity offset by tumultuously heaving, sludge-weighted post-riffery. Black Fire throws punches like a prize fighter, snarling and swaggering into its final round, before the string augmented lamentations of The Forest. Long Wall’s urgent guitar stabs and glowering antipathy are followed by the tragic shimmer of Disconnect. Ascension ends the record on a mellifluous high, Hundred Year Old Man’s rage eventually boiling over from beneath a multifarious uplift of empowering guitar. Existentially consternated and charismatically eruptive, despite the fact that there is little to distinguish the band apart from many of their ilk, Breaching makes for a vital, emotively tremulous debut.

FOR FANS OF: CULT OF LUNA, AMENRA, CONJURER

TOM O’BOYLE