Unspoken

Unspoken is a very strong debut EP from Amongst Wolves. They're a four piece rock band I featured on this blog a few days ago and you can hear my interview with them at this link. Amongst Wolves can best be located within the alternative rock genre. If you like hard edged, grungy rock, you're going to love this EP - you can listen to some of the tracks at the link below.

The opening track So Much More is so well written it will make you sit up and take notice. It's a raw edged rock anthem that exhorts people to question everything and seek for answers to life's questions. It starts with a crawling, Matt Bellamy inspired distorted guitar that morphs into a grungy backdrop for the lead vocals of Kariss Rees (who reminds me a little of Hayley Williams with a touch of plaintive edge from Dolores O'Riordan).

Track 2 starts with a punk chant, and then transgresses into melodic, almost balladic rock. Bottles clearly opens up a dialogue about alcohol and substance abuse, and the haunting vocals 'I need to break the cycle, it can't always be this way' presents a serious message to this generation: Don't throw your life away. The punk chant returns with a poignant outro of 'We won't take it anymore'.

With hardly a break, track three descends on us rapidly with relentless, hard driving guitars ala Paramore or Green Day. Riddled with teenage angst, it's entitled Happily Ever After, and is suffused with cries for desperation, denial and ultimately deliverance.  

Track four seems to be a bonus track not listed on the cover and you won't hear it on the link below. I wish I knew the title, because it deserves to be appreciated for it's message. The middle section with the delayed guitar riffs is particularly well worked and draws the listener into the lyrics about healing a broken heart. It's apt when we are talking about broken hearts and lives - because the lyrics point this out powerfully with 'this broken heart will beat again.'


Kintsukuroi provides some respite from the booming percussion and overdriven guitars, with a gentle guitar track behind spoken vocal. Kintsukuroi is the Japanese art of repairing broken crockery using glue suffused with gold dust. As a philosophy, it views breakages and imperfections as a part of the life story of the object, and when applied to human lives, becomes a message of hope. The lyrics are incredibly powerful: 'The Saviour who broke the night - every gold line tattooed on his skin,' and 'Who takes our mistakes and makes them something beautiful, with what we thought was waste' and 'Precious are the breaks that tried to make you weaker, but with gold in between your'e now stronger. More beautiful than before.' This track is scattered with gold dust.

Clarity, returns to the furious, guitar dominated rock that Amongst Wolves will no doubt make into their signature. It sounds as if they have been heavily influenced by Linkin Park on this track, but their originality shines through. Amongst Wolves will certainly be identified by their meaningful, gritty, but hope laden lyrics and catchy guitar riffs. The EP is released on The Mission label, and it should garner some good airplay.

The EP closes with a final track entitled Let Me Love You that arrives like a fast train, with riffs and rhythms that keeps you interested. The overdriven power chords are enhanced by the delay in places but generally provide a huge wall of sound from which the vocals stand out like bright stars on a cloudless night. 'I won't give up, let me love you' seems to be a call direct from the heart of the Creator God to a lost and desperate world.

This is classy, hard edged rock at it's very best. I'm already a big fan of Amongst Wolves and can't wait for their next release.

Creative Commons License
Unspoken by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pioneers of CCM: Parchment

Image
Keith, Sue and John in 1972 I have told this story before, but it bears repeating. I came to faith in early September 1973 after a day at the Bromyard Folk Festival where I heard a folk-rock trio called Parchment play. I can still remember the rich aroma of the trampled grass that had been baking all day under the warm canvas, as the hot late summer sun beat down upon the large marquee we were sat in. The stage was small, and rather make-shift, but the sound system was powerful, and the microphones on their stands glinted silver. Parchment came onto the stage, looking a little dishevelled and Bohemian, and also quite hairy - and performed a short set that included several of their new songs, but also the CCM classic Light Up The Fire. It was this song that hit me like a ton of bricks. The classic chorus is still sung in schools and churches all over the world today: 'Light up the fire, and let the flame burn. Open the door let Jesus return, take seeds of His Spirit and l...
Read more

Dartmoor prison blues

Image
This is continuation of my short series of posts about how I became involved with Contemporary Christian Music. Previous posts are listed and linked at the foot of this post. Me c 1980 I met Roger Lenk while we were both at Marjons in Plymouth (then a teacher education college). I soon discovered that Roger identified as a 'Messianic Jew' - someone who had been born into the Jewish tradition, but had accepted Yeshua (Jesus) as his mashiach (Messiah). We actually first met during a journey up to Dartmoor Prison where we were both billed to play at an event organised by Youth for Christ. It was a daunting trip for me, because Dartmoor Prison can be a forbidding place at the best of times, and we arrived at Princetown that autumnal evening as an eery fog was drifting in over the moors and the sun had already set. The granite walls of the prison stared at us gauntly, and the sodium lamps cast a sickly yellow hue over the stonework. As the large gates of Dartmoor slammed sono...
Read more

Just Vinyl

Image
I've spent a lot of time in the studio over the last week or so, recording programmes for my new show which will air this Autumn on CrossRhythms radio  (see dates below!) The show is called Just Vinyl, and it features classic Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) tracks, drawn largely from the 1970s and 1980s. I'm playing exclusively vinyl because it has a particular quality and although there are a few clicks and pops every now and then, I think this just adds to the beauty of the medium. Many of the artists I'm featuring are giants of the genre, pioneers of CCM when it was in its infancy, when very few of the musicians were full-time. Today, Christian music is big business - there are radio stations, record labels and management/touring companies dedicated fully to promoting it. Back in the day, very little of this existed, and those who were involved in pioneering CCM had to forge their own pathways. It was not easy to finance ventures into Christian music - most musi...
Read more