Harlots
This Is The Second Death

Harlots is a technical/progressive metal band based out of Ohio and Indiana featuring ex members of Today Is The Day, Dead To Fall, and Eyes Upon Separation. With influences ranging from Discordance Axis and Cryptopsy to Sigur Ros and Don Caballero, they combine every form of extreme music then shatter it to pieces with an ambient wall of sound.

This young and almost unknown (but certainly not inexperienced) band couldn't have found a better way to present themselves to me. Obviously, with the mentioned names, I couldn't help but devour their latest album like a wolf, which I am about to review, namely "This is the Second Death".

This time I will attempt a particular approach (for me) to the album and its sound, retracing step by step the songs that constitute it. It starts already in sixth gear with the duo There are the Paths we choose/These are the Paths we create which shatters any eardrum. Through a compositional scheme full of stop & go, intricate times alternating with paced moments, recaps of previous riffs (clear compositional derivation from math rock), the band channels a declaration of nihilistic and furious identity, beyond any "imposed" path (as the titles themselves also communicate): it is a decidedly grind ideology that we find ourselves facing.

Any subsequent expectation is erased with impeccable brutality and style in the two following songs, Moment of Desperation and Those Days seem Several Hunder Years ago, which present a fierce and lycanthropic metamorphosis in the band, which becomes melancholic and melodic, capable of intriguing and ensnaring with harmonies of great effect and impact... but it seems only a moment, an instant of weakness - or of strength, who knows - and in Remote Coagulation the band goes back on its steps, or rather continues in the systematic deconstruction already operated in the first tracks.

Then comes Moment of Sickness, and it is a malaise, that expressed, which seems to stop time and crystallize it in expanded and rarefied atmospheric sensations... when the band returns to hammer in the two subsequent Ascetism and War of the Great City, it seems a band already transformed, the melodies become prominent - as if there is nothing more to prove, except for a last and furious thrust of grindcore played with great class.

It's the moment of farewell, and with Fall of the Matriarch, with its feeling of heartfelt awareness, of melancholic beauty, perhaps dramatic, yet immensely passionate and felt, one could not ask for a better conclusion: it has the flavor of a goodbye.

This is the second death. And what a sweet death!