It takes nerve to make metal a theatre of political anger without ever descending into the pamphlet. The Scottish band Ashenspire manage it with Hostile Architecture, a record that targets that urban architecture designed to exclude the most destitute — anti-homeless benches, deterrent spikes — and makes it the metaphor for an entire society. Rarely will metal have carried so frontal a message with such composure.
The critics, enthusiastic (an 87 average across ten reviews), see in this second album a major work at the crossroads of black metal, jazz and the avant-garde. They hail the formal audacity, the richness of the arrangements and, above all, the power of a declaimed, almost theatrical voice that recalls spoken word as much as traditional singing.
For Hostile Architecture is not sung, it is proclaimed. The vocalist belches out his indictments over an instrumental whirlwind where saxophone, violin and dislocated drums compose a skilfully orchestrated chaos. The unpredictable structure of the tracks refuses the comfort of the chorus; everything here is movement, rupture, tension. This is a music of unease, exactly attuned to its subject.
This radicalism has a price: the record can disorient, even exhaust the listener ill-prepared for its declamatory intensity. One would sometimes have liked a few breaths, a sharper contrast between the crises. But that reproach belongs to a work that dares too much rather than too little.
Verdict: 8.5/10. A courageous, intelligent record burning with topicality, proving that metal can still be a fully contemporary art of revolt.
