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At Daggers Drawn

New Bruises EP

Written by: PP on 21/10/2011 18:01:56

Prior to peeking at the promo sheet, I was dead sure that At Daggers Drawn were part of the emerging UK hardcore scene given their love for muddily distorted, down-tuned guitars, coarse and roughly barked vocals, and a feeling of confined intensity just waiting to burst out of its container...basically how 80% of the bands at this year's Hevy Fest sounded like. But despite their similarities to a growing number of similar bands from the UK, they are actually from Berlin, Germany, so perhaps the movement is spreading to mainland Europe as well.

"New Bruises" is the latest EP from the Berlin bunch, and it combines together a number of elements from different styles and eras. On one hand, you can detect faint influence from the 90s post-hardcore movement (think Fugazi, etc) given the painstaking lengths the band goes through to build their expression in each song, but primarily their sound is a mixture of original screamo (skramz) and ambient hardcore. The first two tracks might fool you because the coarse vocal delivery and the overtly aggressive approach to driving the song forward recalls the no-frills hardcore of Gallows, Bastions, Daggers, or Burn Down Rome, but starting from the title track and especially EP closer "Old Motions", they start to bring in ambience from post-rock, or more notably, from the beautiful layered hardcore-meets-post-rock landscapes of Envy. This is most definitely the sound At Daggers Drawn need to pursue at length, because both tracks combine just the right amount of melody in the harsh vocals and the delicacy of post-rock in the guitars to create an interesting dynamic. For now, two solid songs out of five doesn't quite warrant a rating on the high-end of our scale, but rest assured that if At Daggers Drawn come out with an album's worth of tracks in the future that are in the vein of those two songs, great things are in store for the band.

Download: New Bruises, Old Motions
For the fans of: Gallows, Modern Life Is War, Envy, Bastions
Listen: Soundcloud

Release date 16.07.2011
Shark Men Records

New Bruises by At Daggers Drawn