Review Summary: swirl swirl fuzz fuzz raah raaaah yahhhh twinkle twinkle
Motions, the sophomore EP from Indonesian collective
A City Sorrow Built, is not a forgiving piece of music by any means. While their contemporaries, all playing a similar blend of post-rock infused European-style screamo in the vein of
Envy,
Raein, and
Funeral Diner, share their raw emotion and constant dynamics, where these other acts utilize painstakingly crafted and inhumanly beautiful crescendos,
A City Sorrow Built instead prefer to keep things to-the-point, raw, and chaotic. This is not, by any means, to say that the four tracks of
Motions lose any of the pure emotion that this band's peers build their music around: indeed, it is utterly apparent to any listener that the musicians of
A City Sorrow Built poured their hearts and souls into this record's disappointingly brief fifteen minutes. Rather, while others utilize meticulous and complex structures to paint their own portraits of love, life, and loss, this particular group throws aimless meandering and seamless production to the wind. Everything about
Motions, from the production to the song structures to the musicianship, is rough and unpolished, totally lacking any form of needless pretension or aimlessness, and in this its music absolutely thrives. It still includes the obligatory post-rock passages and the necessary heavier climaxes, but the former are kept brief and are without fluff, while the latter are some of the most powerful and real musical displays of pain that can be found in the genre. It's not often that a screamo release comes along that displays this level of pure, unadulterated musical and thematic honestly, and it's even less frequent that one actually succeeds in doing so without sounding careless or overly sloppy, but
A City Sorrow Built really have nailed this formula with
Motions. All that's left to do is hope that they channel this newfound excellence into a more substantial release soon, because this group is one that is absolutely brimming with potential.
