Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7.5/10
Anonymity does not guarantee secrecy; to be secret you have to hide everything about yourself, your values, your opinions, your life, your inner most and perhaps haunting thoughts. In art, any type of art, it is surely impossible, for the lyrics seep through, the aggression, the hostility, the beauty, the heartache of the words and the aural onslaught that accompanies it; anonymity only brings intrigue and questions.
It is in the questioning that art can eat away at the soul as much as not allowing the art to live and breathe in you in the first place; to deny yourself is bad, to succumb to the questioning is a mistake of self criminality, you should always be ready to Prepare Consume Proceed, even if it with caution.
Loathe are the latest in a long line of the anonymous but their sound is anything but, brash, bold, confident, in many ways daring and valiant; this is not the sound of a band who do everything they can to bury the sound, to walk away from the cacophony they have created, this is the mask with a message and the message is delivered on a silver plate and it is loud.
Produced by Erik Bickerstaffe and Sean Radcliffe, Prepare Consume Proceed may seem as if treads with no care about the line it follows, yet the lyrics and the pacing of the music suggests otherwise. This is a set of songs that loves the harsh reality, the undeniable way of the world, one that at its very basic level is attracted to and relishes being in the darkness and away from the light.
With tracks such as Banshee, In death, Rest; In Violence and Gehenna all being strident, all coming out as brazen mysterious shadows ganging up on the ears, taking apart the senses one by one and blurring the lines between illumination and spectral wrath, the apparition of destruction is not masked, it is glorified and constant.
Loathe you may be to try something new, it is natural after all, but Loathe is worthy of delving into the dark corners with, anger is only a part of the masks we wear in the pursuit of being anonymous.
Loathe are support to Carcer City at Liverpool’s Bumper on July 22nd.
Ian D. Hall