The Saddest Landscape

You Will Not Survive

Written by: AP on 04/12/2010 01:37:42

"I just want to go back to when we didn't have to drink ourselves to sleep," screamed with a desperate, breathless urgency, is the opening remark of this, The Saddest Landscape's first album in seven years - an album, which systematically deconstructs the glimpse of hopeful longing expressed in the lyric. Listening to these seven fraught, energetic and visceral songs is akin to drinking shot after shot of liqueur, each one a brutal, bitter form of self-punishment and spiraling sense of dismay. "You Will Not Survive" is a difficult album, fraught with grief, regret and anger, and delivered with visceral, chaotic energy.

Combining epic post-rock soundscapes with bursts of vicious guitar and dramatic, shuddering screaming, "You Will Not Survive" is the penultimate skramz record; each song as exhausting to listen to as it evidently is for the band to play. Vocalist Andy Maddox is literally gasping for air as the album trudges toward the incredible crescendo of "From All of Those...". The album overflows with negative emotion, and in some twisted sense the despair that reigns over Maddox's lyrics and singing is as engaging as it is horrifying. The music is brutal, challenging and confrontational, at times unforgiving and always cathartic, like the antithesis of the cursory emotions explored by modern post-hardcore bands. The pain and anguish here is relentless and, above all, honest rather than masked behind glossy production and an infectious chorus.

Indeed, The Saddest Landscape set their sights on the strange and often obscure origins of the genre, where each uttered word carries a significance, and the music sounds like the bloodied final struggle of a tortured, dying soul. It's as real as the earth beneath your feet. "You Will Not Survive" assigns a new meaning to conveying emotion; the songs build tension only to unleash panic, projecting all their furious intensity at the listener who finds himself overcome by an apocalyptic disposition and seeing only in shades of grey. There isn't a glimpse of faith, no sense of reward, but the overwhelming feeling that everything is irreparably wrong.

"You Will Not Survive" plays like a human being reduced to a miserable, humiliated wreck. The soundscape is profusely melodic, yes, but even with the celestial female singing that lingers in the background of "Imperfect But Ours" the atmosphere remains bleak at best; the force brutal and unrelenting. And yet, the inventive and paradoxically beautiful songwriting makes this hellish scorching of an album irresistible. If you would like to feel worthless, or if your day needs ruining, then this album is the ultimate soundtrack to facilitate your misery. Forget shallow pop punk about trying, losing and dying, this is the real deal - a journey to the bottom.

8

Download: Eternity is Lost on the Dying, Imperfect But Ours, The Shadows I Call Home
For the fans of: Envy, Her Breath On Glass, La Dispute, Pianos Become The Teeth
Listen: Myspace

Release date 28.09.2010
Panic Records

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