Albums

Album Review: Ceremony

[Album: Still Nothing Moves You]
[Label: Bridge 9 Records]

Whoa. This is not your typical Bridge 9 hardcore release. This is neither the current flavour of youth crew revival, nor heavy, metal-influenced hardcore. This is the sort of stuff that sweaty big-boned people with beards and skinny kids with bandanas wave their fists to in dirty squats. Maybe the sort of music you can imagine American G.I.s use to torment prisoners in Guantanamo Bay in order to “talk”. This is doom-laden, melt-the-flesh-off-your-bones hardcore with hints of thrash here and there. It is somewhat refreshing and encouraging that a band with such an eclectic sound as this will get their records out there on a label as important and popular as Bridge 9. Hopefully people who aren’t into this sound won’t shy away from it. Stuff like this is highly recommended for those not familiar with heavy music or the ‘core and who want to sink straight down the deep end of the pool.

Ceremony, for the uninitiated, are inspired by Infest and the millions (that’s right, millions) of Japanese fastcore and power violence bands that call 625Thrash and MCR Records home. Few things have changed for Ceremony since 2006’s appropriately-titled ‘Violence Violence’, another bookmark in contemporary hardcore. Ceremony clearly have a load of things they want to talk about and hammer into your head, so instead of doing anything different (like growing fringes and picking up acoustic guitars) they have simply turned up their unique combination of atmospherics and short, compressed bursts of aural violence to 11. The atmospherics are as haunting as ever and the short bursts of anger are more to the point as ever, at times making you wonder whether these songs are really exercises in organised brutal chaos. The instrumentals ‘Vagrant’ and ‘Overcast’ are not too far off from sounding like the soundtrack to a video-game like Manhunt; I can almost hear Brian Cox talking to me, goading me to do unspeakable things with a plastic bag and a pair of pliers. You get the sense that you are somehow witnessing something you shouldn’t; something as horrible as a school-bus full of cannibals ploughing into a school yard during recess, yet you can’t quite take your eyes off the wreck and not crack a smile in content.

While there isn’t a stand-out track like on any of their earlier records, songs like the epic ‘He-god-Has Favored Our Undertakings’ and the short ‘Entropy: No Meaning Is Also An Answer’ cover a lot bases, with tempo-changes, cryptic-sounding lyrics and that ever-present sense of dread that develops throughout the record. What becomes apparent though about this release is that it is a record in the truest sense of the word, as opposed to a collection of songs thrown together to reach that (hardcore) industry-standard 20-minute length mark. You can’t really separate any of the songs and make a “hit” single out of it, which in this day and age of selective listening (no thanks to Internet downloading and disposable CD compilation) is quite remarkable and enviable. This record is meant to be consumed in one go, all-together and without any reservations. The ride might be bumpy (at times you will wonder what the hell is going on) but that’s the way power violence should be.

For Fans Of: Infest, Negative Approach, Spazz

Band Link:
Ceremony

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