Fall of Efrafa
Owsla

"All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand enemies. 

And when they catch you, they will kill you. 

But first they must catch you; digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. 

Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed."

A project that is a declaration of intent. A temporary group, they wanted to record three albums, and they recorded three albums. Everything they wanted to say, they said it.

A project born in 2005 from the mind of Alex CF Bradshaw, a mastermind who recently pulls the strings behind Light Bearer and until recently of the now-defunct Momentum, groups that share the same desire to narrate and lead the listener to reflect and look inside themselves (as hardcore attitude entails, after all).

Describing what constitutes and defines their music is challenging. I could say how they completely drew from "Watership Down", the book written in 1972 by Richard Adams, too often mistakenly considered a simple children's novel, when instead it conveys a message as dark as it is profound.

Exactly like the music itself, which finds its foundation in neurotic post-hardcore, perhaps borrowing the sound from Isis and rooting itself in an epic and dark crust/d-beat reminiscent of Wolfbrigade if not Tragedy. Accelerations, semi-sudden slowdowns, and then restarts, hypnotic riffs rather than brute force, expansions accompanied by disorienting violin incursions (which unfortunately were lost in later albums), all of unmatched intensity.

It would be enough to talk only about the final piece, that "The Fall Of Efrafa" which in its quarter of an hour is capable of encapsulating the entire soul of the group. From a beginning suspended in an almost post-rock void, with tension building as the instrumental threads develop, to the explosion perfectly balanced between post-core reiterations and Discharge-ian rides; an explosion that consumes itself to make room for the first interlude, with that violin capable of painting an imminent threat, which will arrive when the piece explodes again, until it all fades into a rain shower anticipated by the same previous violin. The threat finally rages and the storm has broken out. And over it all lies Alex's voice, indebted to hardcore and Neurosis but deeply personal in his almost declamatory scream.

Music, however, that serves only as the base on which to narrate the enormous allegory that constitutes the lyrics, related to themes of atheism, oppression, anti-totalitarianism, antispeciesism.

Tales of arrogance, something that belongs only to our race, the race that has placed itself on the pedestal of gods to kick the rest of life down; because we are the first of the species to have evolved beyond a limit, we feel (we can) have control over everything.

Tales of the butcher man, who brings scourge always in the name of arrogance, when he takes from the earth, bending the earth to his will, killing incalculable numbers of other living beings at the base of his semi-divine pedestal, thus thinking it is his right to exert superiority.

But we are not a race chosen by any God; and when we die, the world will not die with us.

We are Efrafa, and in our convictions, we propel ourselves autonomously toward the end.

One day Efrafa will fall, and it may be the only way for the earth to find peace.

But it is also the only one capable of changing this destiny, its own as well as that of everyone else.

But until then, the fields will remain covered in blood, as long as Efrafa takes the right to write others' laws, they will mark the day and their paws will weigh on the weak.

The warren is empty tonight.