Album Review :: Night Verses - Into The Vanishing Light

Night Verses

Into The Vanishing Light 

July 8 2016 (Graphic Nature / Equal Vision Records)

8.5/10

Words: Alison Mack

This second album from the LA band, 'Into The Vanishing Light', was recorded in Venice Beach, California with legendary producer Ross Robinson (At The Drive In, The Cure), and if you were expecting something ethereally somnambulant by the name of the band, you will be in for a shock. Softly comforting is not the description for this 11-track album that is satuated in the atmospheric sound of progressive hardcore.

On this follow-up to their critically acclaimed 2013 debut, 'Lift Your Existence', Night Verses interweave dark textures of ambient noise with bone-crushing post-rock, as Douglas Robinson pulls out an emotive array of vocal screams at one minute, canorus the next.

Opening track ‘The Future As History: I Love You Dead’ is brooding number that sets the tone for the record: brutal post-hardcore interwoven with dreamy intricate shoegaze guitar riffs, deftly paraded throughout the song's first four minutes in alternation. Lead single ‘A Dialogue In Cataplexy’ follows on the heels of 'Lift Your Existence', though presenting bigger, more raw off-kilter and discordant verses, completed by a radio-friendly chorus vibes. 'Blue Shades Of The Sun' also features a harmonious chorus that is grafted into a song where Robinson all but tears himself apart in its execution.

'Drift' hones the dark post-punk in a manner which our own Eagulls have managed so well, mixed with shades of the Doors. It is an incredibly impressive, atmospheric sonic delight. “This song is about the calm before taking on whatever stands in your way,” vocalist Robinson has revealed. “It’s a peacefulness that is ready to seek and destroy at any given moment. The internal calm before the storm.”

Elsewhere, both dark and poetic in form is the visceral four minutes of 'Panic And Pull Your Heart Out', while closer, 'Phoenix III: Into The Vanishing Light' is all ten minutes-plus of pulverising prog-rock that will leave the listener as exhausted as Robinson must have been after recording this frenetic-paced monster of an anthem that lyrically includes lines like, "Fall dead in the darkness through a vacant sky/But I'll come back because you keep me alive/You're the permanent solution", against such harsh and discordant melodies that may seem an ill-fitting in theory, but somehow Night Verses still manage to lend a beautiful finesse.