Review Summary: “When I said I prayed I’d die before you — I meant in front of”
By the time
Innocents hit the shelves, Only Living Witness were already dead. Attribute it to what you will: the usual intra-band tensions; a very, very bad record deal that hamstrung the musical output of individual members for decades yet after the band’s demise; a career that just wasn’t taking off; or a confluence of factors — whatever the ultimate cause, the album Only Living Witness wrote as a mission statement in the end turned out to be a eulogy.
But what a eulogy it was. Listen to
Innocents, and you’ll immediately scramble to the liner notes to confirm that, yes, it was indeed recorded in 1995, and not a decade later. Not content to rest on the laurels of their stellar debut, on
Innocents, Only Living Witness shed the last vestiges of the dying crossover thrash sound for something altogether more indelible, slowing down the tempo a hair, smelting their Iron Age riffs down to (very chunky) brass tacks, and ceasing to be so bashful about the fact that their music was always meant to be
catchy, if not downright anthemic.
No longer self-effacingly hiding in the back of the mix, vocalist Jonah Jenkins sounds positively reinvigorated on
Innocents, with the music this time seemingly written around his voice instead of the obverse. The blazing four-to-the-floor stomp of opener “No Eden” immediately finds Jenkins belting with a confidence and command heretofore only hinted at, insistently repeating one-liners above a caterwauling rhythm section. Musically, the band’s decision to go all-in on the chunky, drop-tuned stop-start bounce riffs Silverman and Crowley crank out in lockstep on tracks like “Deed’s Pride” and “Freaklaw” pays dividends, with the band’s laser focus on doing one thing and doing it well resulting in a stylistic and qualitative consistency that lends these tracks a remarkable level of replayability.
Innocents’ true accomplishment, however, is its sense of space - rarely in heavy music are grooves given the room to breathe that Only Living Witness’ songwriting chops afford them. Drummer Eric Stevenson takes full advantage of this too, handing in the performance of a lifetime, replete with inventive fills and change-ups that become the hooks of tracks like the careening “Downpour” and the extended outro jam of “Knew Her Gone” while stalwartly refusing to fall back on double-kick abuse or devolve into unsportsmanlike peacockery.
Only Living Witness make sure to slot some surprises into the tracklist though. “Hank Crane”, expanding upon the short acoustic interlude “Placid Hill” earlier in the piece, is an ambitious harmonica-backed six minute slow burn that opens up into a fully orchestrated cowboy ballad sweeping enough to bring a tear to Ennio Morricone’s eye. The other side of the coin, “Total Particle Reversal”, sees Jenkins rending his vocal cords to match the aural violence of this surprisingly Crowbar-influenced closer, ending the album with the heaviest moment of Only Living Witness’ despairingly short career.
And thus it ends, not with a whimper, but with a bang. At first blush,
Innocents presents a conundrum. It is an effort that toys with a palette of tropes endemic to heavy metal, alt rock and hardcore punk. Yet somehow, this band happened upon a sound that, though immediately familiar, is confoundingly unique in execution. Perhaps the closest parallel to the sound of
Innocents is Helmet’s streamlined 1997 effort
Aftertaste — but even this comparison is misleading, with Only Living Witness not only beating Helmet to the punch, but doing it while displaying an earnest love for a well written melody that the laconic Hamilton always felt the need to intellectualise an arm’s length from. Want to know where Killswitch Engage got the inspiration for the arena-ready chorus of “My Last Serenade”? Album highlight “Strata” may be a clue.
On
Innocents, Only Living Witness found a sound that was simultaneously ahead of its time — anticipating both the churning turn-of-the-millennium alt metal boom and the increasingly melodic metalcore that would follow — and timeless. Listen carefully though, and you might just hear hints of of their sound in any number of twenty-first century acts. Only Living Witness will forever live on in the DNA of heavy music like a loan word bandied about in conversation by a populace that has long since forgotten its etymology.
But those who remember? Yeah, they blast
Innocents at full volume.
