Review Summary: When it takes you six years to release your debut record, by the time it comes out it might just sound a little dated.
There’s always an element to a band’s popularity overtime that is outside their control and beyond their actual capabilities. Momentum, trends, marketing can break or make your music career and smarter bands tend to ride a wave or sound until it’s no longer popular before jumping onto the next wave. While not a hard recipe for success, this trend-hopping trend of sorts (no pun intended) has allowed many underground bands to come out of dark and dusty basements and tour the Warped, Impericon, and Never Say Die stages of the world. The proverbial being in the right place at the right time stands as true for people on the daily as it does for bands, and Acres on Lonely World show us what taking too long to release a record sounds like.
Acres’ underground career has always been a bit of question mark. The South England quartet impressed everyone back in 2013 with their S/T debut EP, and confirmed those positive impressions in the following years thanks to a second EP and the single ‘The Tallest of Mountains’ easily their best work as of yet. Their sapient mix of hardcore and melodic atmospheric elements wasn’t new by any means, but registered as tasteful, convincing and especially mature. Such a strong display of intents, you would assume, would lead to a breakthrough debut record and a tour cycle, instead the band’s momentum never got quite rolling and as of 2017 their catalogue had only added a handful more tracks. Finally in 2019 Acres released their long-anticipated debut album, a (overly) melodic hardcore record of sorts that reminisces very little of the band’s previous identity and a lot more of the metalcore-gone-pop heyday of the mid 2010’s. Unfortunately for them however, they’re six years late to the party.
Fast forward to 2019 and we are left with very little of Acres’ promising debut EP, with every song on Lonely World soaked in stale melancholia and drenched in apathetic dramaturgy. The 10 tracks on this record cumbersomely move between nostalgia and anger, portraying a pretty grim picture of a world that yes, can be harsh, unforgiving, and indeed very lonely. It’s easy to guess what negative experiences drive these songs, but it’s a lot harder to guess why they sound as washed out and unimaginative as they do on this record. While exploring the layered spectrum of these very human emotions, Acres forget to explore just how varied the sound palette at their disposal is, and deliver a song after another of unimpressive melodic hardcore that is as uneventful as it is unoriginal. To the band’s credit, this album does sound heartfelt and honest. There’s little in the way of any sign of trying to cheat your way into every former 2010’s hardcore kid’s Spotify fodder or winking at a far less abrasive soundscape and make the cut for next year’s SXSW (think of every hardcore band gone shoegaze and there you have it). Lonely World’s intentions are true, sincere, and wholesome and can be appreciated for what they are, but unfortunately not for how they are presented.
Acres’ offering in 2019 is stripped back and melodic to the max. The band’s approach on their debut full length favours very stripped back guitar melodies and a surprisingly vocal-driven delivery over the intricate atmospheric post-metal/hardcore of previous releases. The mellow instrumentation on the record soberly and sombrely moves between Devil Sold His Soul’s style melodic hardcore, emo, and alternative rock * la Moving Mountains, with this mostly bare-bones sound serving as pretty much a background for Ben Lumber’s singing. Ben’s vocals are definitely mature and fit for this style, however not varied or powerful enough to hold up a record of this weight alone. For a band that made of atmospheric progression their trademark, this album is surprisingly one-dimensional. Every track follows in the same monotonous path of its predecessor, slowly building for a climax that never fully ignites nor explodes. Like a passenger constantly reminding you to push on the brake pedal, these songs are slow burners that just burn away without leaving a mark. In its very blue monochromatic narration, Lonely World manages to blend in more than stand out. The drawn-out instrumentation and vocal character of the record do nothing to favour its tried atmospheric progression, on the contrary they hinder it from reaching full bloom. These tracks are not particularly moody, or evocative, they are not particularly bombastic or grandiose; they’re constrained, pulled back by this very minimal, passé song-writing. Uncertain whether to sever their hardcore roots altogether Acres do splash a few “core” elements on Lonely World but they’re really too few and far between to bear anything fruitful. These sparse moments don’t hit particularly hard or swing the record towards a “heavier” direction, and sometimes, like on ‘Hurt’, feel straight up misplaced.
Some of the shorter, punchier songs could lift the album up if again the stripped back instrumentals didn’t grind up to mush any mordent left in the tracklist. Case in point, Lullaby, the longest and slowest song on the record. Poignantly placed in the middle of the record, this song could serve as a watershed of sorts, a divider between the album’s two contrasting halves or the masterpiece that brings them back together. Instead we get this moody melodic ballad with these stripped-down chorus and pounding drums that sound straight out of a pop punk record. Guitars are nowhere to be heard, and I’m sorry but it really sounds like a throw back to that time Architects tried to include a ballad on one of their records (remember that? Terrifying). Through their slow-moving, climax-chasing progressions these songs are barely atmospheric, barely evocative, with very little in the way of any particular emotion at all, and ultimately not interesting enough to sound convincing, let alone immersive. The vocals are just too overpowering and the guitar melodies too thin and washed out to favour these progressions. In its cumbersome attempt at evoking feelings of solitude, delusion, and anger, Lonely World forgets to evoke the most important thing: interest.
Lonely World is a very undecided record. It sees Acres stand at a cross road unsure on which turn to take and eventually pull a 180 and drive back. This record is not as much the result of a gradual and organic progression (what most would call a band maturing or experimenting with their sound), but a departure from everything the band did so well in their starting days. The end result sounds very little like the band we came to appreciate and a lot more like a faded copy of every 2010’s metalcore band’s attempt at being dramatic and edgy. Lonely World is just not strong enough to stand on its own against the wave it so desperately tries to ride. It’s almost like Acres wanted to differentiate themselves and stand out but forgot what made them unique in the first place. Instead, they serve us with every stale formula in this oversaturated genre, with the aggravating factor that they’re now six years late on this trend. The only thing that really stands out, is how outdated it all sounds. There isn’t enough variation in mood, in style, in sound, and in execution on this record to keep the audience entertained, engaged, transported. Lonely World tries so hard to transport the listener and evoke feelings of loss and solitude yet its delivery is too one-dimensional to serve such multifaceted purpose. What we’re left with is a band toying with a style that was never quite their own and a sound that is ridiculously outdated and several years past its expiry date.
2.7/5
Again an extra 0.2 for the cover art, I like it a lot.
Favourite Tracks: Deathbed, Medicine
Least Favourite Tracks: Lullaby, Sharpen your Teeth, Hurt
