Holy hell! The UK has slapped me in the face with some amazing metal. I have seriously fallen in love with Raging Speedhorn's Before the Sea Was Built. I started listening to this album not realizing I had to review it and am damn excited to let everyone know how effing great this album really is. The album begins with a dark and tranquil "Everything Changes" which grows ever so slowly into a massacre of quiet and nice. This is a great foreshadowing to the rest of Before the Sea Was Built. Begin to take notes from here kiddies, for the professor has just begun. Proceeding on into the album's title track "Before the Sea Was Built," you are brought into a deep chasm where sounds of progressive power enfold your eardrums filling the void where this music never was before in your mind.
"Dignity Stripper" pounds through with the deep dark sounds of the lyrics that move into the chorus all the time keeping that near-evil sound. Then things take a turn into a new more post-rock feel in "Mishima" and still one cannot help but listen to the powerful rasps and screams of Jon Loughlin and Allister Reed. Another turn and you fall into the unexpected "The Last Comet from Nothingness" which jumps from near silence to full, bone crushing metal in a snap and continues to crush bones to powder until the last second of the song.
A twist of fates brings you back a few paces to more bone crushing. Even though you thought all that was left was powder, "Born to Twist the Knife" grinds the powder of your bones at the atomic level, stripping electrons nonstop. "Who Will Guard the Guards" begins with a slower tempo but nevertheless pushes you into that chasm of dark brutish metal which we all know and love. The growls on this song are the best of the album, so kudos to the guys for that.
A speedier "Too Drunk To Give A f***" flips you on your ear and gives you a piece of its mind via some well-written guitar parts like an angry pedophile to a 16-year-old convicted as an adult for some crime. Do you get the picture there? It's then that the wave (unintended pun) of post-rock hits you again and the wake of it leaves "Sound Of Waves." The push and pull of this song gives the feeling of being stuck in a dark, rust-covered room. Can you smell the rusty water dripping from the ceiling?
To finish the album, "Jump Ship" takes its barely-two-minute self and finally jams the final nail into your wrist to keep you up on the cross. It really makes the album complete.
From beginning to end, I was satisfied. There's no other way to say it. To think I thought I had randomly come across this album, but I had to do it for a review makes me glad that there are bands out there that can still surprise me with their original sound and makes me stop and think "There may still be hope for music after all," is quite an accomplishment in my books. Hell's yeah for Raging Speedhorn.
