Review Summary: “Let’s suppose there is a bomb underneath the table between us. There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” -Alfred Hitchcock
There is a promising and engaging 35-minute album lying somewhere in the wreckage of
Return. Unfortunately, it’s been mercilessly extended out to about a 65-minute runtime, turning a sparse and taut post-rock odyssey into a maddening endurance challenge. Rather than attempt to hook their audience with technical skill or catchy melodies, Deathcrash opt to tell their musical story purely through atmosphere and dynamics. This is a perfectly valid songwriting strategy, and it’s been utilized successfully by countless artists at this point. Deathcrash are not one of those artists. Opener “Sundown” takes the 8 minutes it’s been presented with and pisses approximately 7 of them away, with the empty spaces in its quieter moments serving no purpose other than to make the arrangement sound even more hollow than it already is. After a destabilizing series of false starts in the song’s second half, it climaxes with a whimper over Line 6-quality distortion. Much to my chagrin, this track serves as a blueprint for the majority of
Return’s tracklist.
This isn’t to say that it’s all bad; “Horses” isn’t quite brilliant, but its slowcore sensibilities and use of dual guitar leads at least keep me interested, a task most of the other songs usually aren’t up to. It clocks in at about 4 minutes, and if you decide to give this a listen, you’ll begin to notice the trend of the shorter songs absolutely running circles around the longer ones. Acoustic interlude “Matt’s Song” shines due to its simplicity and faint studio banter, while “Wrestle With Jimmy” actually manages to follow an interesting trajectory and say more in two minutes than Deathcrash’s other tracks say in close to ten. Back half lowlights “Was Living” and “Doomcrash” both arrive at thunderous conclusions, at least in terms of volume. However, their momentum is murdered by the borderline unbearable journey the listener makes along the way, with nothing new being added to the atmosphere in the ample time the band gave themselves to create further tension. It doesn’t matter where a song ends up if the journey to that point is completely uninteresting, and this is a problem that a large concentration of the album’s runtime suffers from.
Alfred Hitchcock was once famously quoted as saying “I enjoy playing the audience like a piano”, so I feel like he probably would have hated
Return. It’s an album full of dynamic shifts but completely devoid of thrills, monotonous in its softness and toothless in its aggression. What results is a disjointed and tedious Hitchcock knock-off of a record that fails miserably at creating any suspense, to the point where I’m not sure Deathcrash is even aware there was a bomb under the table in the first place.
