Review Summary: The musical embodiment of that unique feeling that hits you when you realize a great joy has left your life...
Whenever one experiences a particularly trying or stressful moment in his or her life, the emotions that go along with that are overpowering. Through loss of a loved one, a shattered relationship, or a feeling of failure, one feels rage, sadness, frustration, and hopelessness magnified exponentially. In Love Let Me Go, More Than Life attempted to replicate those horrible emotions through music, and have unfortunately succeeded overwhelmingly.
The key feature this album has to offer is how everything melds so well. I wouldn’t say that any instrument overpowers the rest, or even stands out. It’s a mess: a beautiful, hopeless, dreary, gray mess. The flood of music usually overwhelms in a sort of wave of sound. It builds, swells, crests, and crashes through wholly. It breaks you down and picks you back up, then breaks you down again. It’s truly relentless. The use of feedback only helps to magnify this feeling of despair this album so ruthlessly pushes on the listener.
This feeling is entirely embodied in the vocals. Like most hardcore albums, the vocal delivery on this album is raw, powerful, and emotional. However, despite this kind of conventionality, there is a distinctly unique element of More Than Life: sadness. The vocals on this album always feel so destroyed and hopeless. Like a man screaming out for help for anybody who will listen, he seems at the end of his rope, rounding off the hopelessness of the already depressing composition. You can’t help but feel sorry for him. However, the key to appreciating this album fully is allowing yourself to feel sorry for him.
Scarlet Skyline slowly builds the album, starting with feedback and noise, and allowing it to grow until the song breaks open entirely. Most songs follow this pattern, and the album as a whole truthfully follows this pattern, breaking entirely at Daisy Hill, which I can say is probably one of the most emotional songs ever recorded. When the vocals swell, and the music seems to rip apart at the seams into a chaotic mess that is almost impossible to resist connecting to in times of strife.
Though this album fulfills its purpose flawlessly, I can never consider it perfect for one simple reason. Human beings do not typically want to feel overwhelmed with negative emotion. Sadness, rage, hopelessness, and despair are all things we usually try to minimize in our lives. Listening to Love Let Me Go makes all of these emotions somewhat unavoidable. However, without this emotional connection, Love Let Me Go would be entirely worthless. It is magical because it can overwhelm and conquer. In times of despair, it is extremely cathartic, and will help you move past whatever is destroying your happiness quite well. That being said, it holds no meaning unless you actually let yourself embrace the music wholly and need some form of emotional purging.
Embracing it is the true key to Love Let Me Go. Rather than sitting back and listening, immerse yourself into the hopeless world of More Than Life. Scream the lyrics, face up to the fears, and just let the sadness wash over you. It’s not an enjoyable journey, but at the right time, it can be more rewarding than anything else. It will turn a good day bad, a bad day worse, but for some reason it demands to be appreciated. So give into it, cleanse yourself of problems, and let go.
