Modern Pain – ‘Peace Delusions’ Review
Posted: by Sean Gonzalez
Imagine the straight faced, raw emotional appeal of hardcore music backed by spastic instrumentation, whimsical guitar melodies, dazed in effects of something out of shoegaze genre. As weird as it sounds, the spacey atmosphere isn’t as tortured as one would think, instead offering a bright light to display the sorrow through. Modern Pain have come to display this formula with as much passion as the pure, energetic speed of the previous waves of the genre. Peace Delusions is their debut LP being released from Bridge 9 records on September 4th.
After a noisy opening, ‘Ego Death’ takes the album to it’s mainstay. Littered across the tune is frantic drumming being paired with tenacious and booming guitars, heavily doused in phasers to fuzz the overall texture. It’s the soundtrack to a maniacal scientist conducting horrifying experiments to the brevity of the genre, with the vocals laying out this exact feeling with petrified screams and laughs. ‘When The Hymn Fades’ sounds like the inner monologue of a demon finding his next victim to torture. The drums have a natural reverb on them that makes the syncopation they provide with each boom have an added raw power. ‘My Reality Is Slipping Away’ plays like a soul slowly drifting away from sanity. Starting off with the chaos of life before the track begins unwinding and coming to a startled stop.
Modern Pain have done this all before, but what makes this album more special is the band’s growth into the sound. Self Deconstruction sounded like a standard aggressor to the genre. A track like ‘4202’ very much fits the recipe found on that previous EP, but here it breathes more urgency, helped by the unique approach to the guitars. Not only do their effects help shape the sound, but it allows the vocalist to deliver his lines with a more frantic, muffled sound without losing his own instrumentation to minute and a half banger. When he needs to, he can let the entirety of his anger shine through with discordant screams, like found on ‘Leave Me Here.’ After the spits of anger, the guitars take over and whittle away with haunting motifs expertly glazed with twisting effects.
Peace Delusions is nothing short of odd. Described as “if In Utero was a hardcore record,” the band has no problem shining in that light. The aggressive tracks are met with noise, capturing an essence of Converge at times with the blasting drums and inaudible, inhuman vocals. At the root of their sound is the 80s style hardcore that was filled with sinister chord progressions and relatively straight laced angst, but Modern Pain have added more bombastic grooves filled with equally mad cadences. This is nothing short of the bands best work to date.
Score: 8.25/10
Pick Up The Album Right Here: https://bridge9.bandcamp.com/album/peace-delusions
