Review Summary: You spoke of the end and said nothing at all. Give up.
Falling back in and falling out, darkness is heavy, weighs a ton. Hold on to only what you know, keep safe your blurry memories, don’t lose yourself among the trauma. Nerves creates, sculpts, and spawns a sonic landscape that is so obviously devoid of any sympathy that the term “unrelenting” isn’t in their vocabulary. Blending genres of metal, psychedelic, and dark hardcore, Nerves has an album that moves so effortlessly from pounding drums, piercing guitars, and tortured vocals, to trance like intermissions with astounding ease.
"My heart strings barely flutter on anything"
“A Phantasmal Entity” lifts the curtain on this record as reverb soaked guitars are slowly plucked, slowly drawn up in volume, crescendo, the nightmare begins. “Appears Shrouded…” showcases what Nerves has done to a niche of extreme music. Gathering influences from all walks of metal, hardcore, punk, Nerves has rounded up the best of all genres. Mastodon influenced guitar work, Converge influenced intensity, and The Dillinger Escape Plan influenced musicianship, all are put together to create an array of influences, the opposite of a counterfeit, and pumping with originality.
"Point-black reality, failure"
Nerve’s runs from earache level of intensity on such songs as “Skinned as a Widow” and “The Water Sleeps My Lungs”, to spacey LSD grooved rhythms such as “Spilling Fingernails and Bloodsap” and “Reifying Hallucinatory Hex”. Accompanied by phenomenal, off kilter, jazz influenced drumming and deliberate, firm, and demanding bass work, Nerves keeps measure by measure, crisp, unusual, progressive. Trading vocal delivery between the two guitarists gives a range from shouts, to clean vocals, to throat retching screams.
To strange to define, too heavy to be taken lightly, and too kinetic to be determined, Nerves will appeal to any fan of dark music. Several years after the end of Nerves, this record still holds tremendous weight and will still rip your face off.
