Review Summary: Flooding out the deeper hues of life
ERRA’s self-titled launched the current iteration of the band to new heights they had never seen, both commercially and creatively. Coming off the heels of the unfocused
Neon, ERRA signaled to the world that they were hungry to prove themselves, and in every corner of that record you can hear the band clawing their way to make their defining work. They had managed to take the gentler, poppier direction they introduced on
Drift and
Neon and fused it with the style of their classic first two albums that perfected the progressive metalcore sound they pioneered, while managing to expand the range of their influences even wider in both directions. It showcased new peaks for both vocalists, with JT Cavey utilizing by far the most range and power he ever had, and clean singer Jesse Cash simultaneously delivering his finest vocal writing and performance to date. Most importantly, it displayed a band that was finally free of expectations and knew how to not only write with each other, but also how to listen for what the songs actually need rather than based on audience expectation. For the first time since the departure of original members Garrison Lee and Alan Rigdon, an ERRA album felt natural.
This album set an extremely high bar for ERRA to have to live up to, further exacerbated by their newfound boost in popularity. Although the self-titled and its successive deluxe edition provided new roads to travel, it largely served as the summation of what the band had been doing the 10 years beforehand. While initially the band had promised to deepen their sound from here, the successive standalone “Pull from the Ghost” as well as this album’s lead single “Pale Iris” largely painted the picture of a band in victory lap mode. Upon release, these songs sounded shockingly complacent and made it seem as if they were willing to simply rest on the past success of the self-titled as the formula for the next project. Thankfully,
Cure is not that album, and instead may be their biggest jump in sound between releases since JT’s arrival.
While ERRA's DNA is recognizably intact, they have seen some notable changes in their formula. In the words of Jesse himself, this album builds off of right hand technicality as opposed to left hand technicality, with the glimpses of Meshuggah, Tool and TesseracT influence peeking through the self titled serving largely as the foundation of this album. This results in a much groovier, more mid tempo experience and leans less into the vibrancy that defined the self titled album, particularly exemplified in the guitar work. The band have also expanded the scope of their influences even wider, with flavors of industrial serving as pronounced seasoning on "Slow Sour Bleed", "Crawl Backwards Out of Heaven" and the title track. Jesse also displays the most experimentalism he's ever approached his vocal timbre with, going as far as to make the opening hook on the album his attempt at making his singing emulate the quality of a guitar bending. For a band whose appeal was so synonymous with the tenor range, he spends a significant portion of this record in the lower octave. It's an aesthetic choice that gels perfectly alongside the slower riffage on display, and illustrates someone who is constantly thinking of new avenues of creativity. Given he reportedly has an easier time singing in his higher register as well, it's a particularly admirable challenge to take on, and it yields simultaneously stunning and unsettling results depending on which lane the album chooses to lean into.
Although the run of songs that open the album generally maintain the most of ERRA's usual hallmarks, with "Rumor of Light" boasting the album's sole dazzling guitar solo and "Idle Wild" magnificently expanding upon the terrain set by the deluxe tracks, nearly every song from this point until lead off single "Pale Iris" offers a different side of the band from the last. This is a sharp contrast from self titled essentially clustering songs based on key region and seamlessly cycling through modal voices every 2-3 songs to give the impression as if you're traveling between four distinct tonal islands, particularly when realizing this is the first ERRA album to never repeat two consecutive songs in the same tuning. For the most part, the results are stunning. "Blue Reverie" kicks us off with a spacious ballad echoing aesthetics from
Drift and Jesse's side project Ghost Atlas filtered through a desolate, arctic lens. This serves as one of their most balanced and surprising slower tracks as the roaring breakdown emerges like a snow plow through a blizzard. The ethereal fade out of "Blue Reverie" leads right into the mechanical "Slow Sour Bleed", which flips the vibe entirely on its face for a menacing track reminiscent of present day Northlane but deployed in a much more crushing package. It also creatively inverts the usual vocal split in the band, as Jesse's ominous clean verses allow JT to take the reins with a screamed chorus. These two songs back to back display one of the widest dynamic leaps between any pairing on an ERRA album, further visible as "Crawl Backwards Out of Heaven" pushes the album into its heaviest, most jagged territory immediately after "Past Life Persona" delivers arguably the band's most deliberately poppy exercise to date. Where ERRA once felt an obligation to throw every color of paint on the canvas at all times, this sees each track more settled into representing just a side of the prism.
The most effective display of contrast comes with instrumental interlude "Wish", as trippy clean guitar flourishes establish a sense of serenity that gradually introduces creeping tension on the horizon until dropping into the earth-shattering riff that kicks off album highlight "Glimpse". This track finds an exhilarating balance between the ERRA hallmarks of old and the groovier, more somber thread that runs through this whole album, as onslaughts of harmonic scrapes rain down like artillery between the titanic grooves. Jesse's chorus glides through the track like sunlight and shines as one of his most mesmerizing moments to date, particularly once the song dissolves into its gorgeous outro in which the vocal harmony and the main line gradually swirl around each other via vocal automation. “End to Excess” is similarly able to fuse the ERRA of old and new gloriously, as the song seamlessly switches between 4/4 almost Misery Signals-esque verses and Jesse’s soaring 6/8 chorus. This song culminates with a huge payoff that boasts some of JT’s most commanding presence on an ERRA album.
As often goes with shifting the formula so heavily, this album isn't without its growing pains, albeit a respectably minimal amount. Jesse's choice to focus on lower range melodies throughout a good portion of the album serve as a remarkable aesthetic compliment to the musical direction, but there are a few moments here and there where they feel a smidge too bare bones for their own good. "Rumor of Light" boasts a pre-chorus that exclusively hovers between the first three notes of the scale, and unfortunately somewhat takes away some of the character from an otherwise very strong song. This does at least help emphasize the impact of the actual chorus, but it's hard not to shake that it's a bit too low on the seasoning that could have taken the song up another level. This unfortunately is much more detrimental on lead single "Pale Iris", which approaches its patterns in a similar fashion except doubles down and treads the exact same melodic ground in every section of the song. While the breakdown is strong, the riffs on the whole in this song also leave a bit to be desired, largely coming across as a cheap self-titled derivation without much in the way of subversion of expectation. Worse yet, this song serves as a jarring and out of place penultimate track. The sequencing does absolutely no favors for "Pale Iris", nor does the song benefit the continuity of the record as a whole. While this is somewhat mitigated by the stellar album closer "Wave", it does make that song feel detached from the rest of the album. This isn’t the only area where the sequence falters a bit, as sometimes the transitions between songs are too exaggerated that they buck the flow of the record. This is particularly evident on "Blue Reverie", which feels jarringly early in the running and takes away from the momentum of the songs on either side of it. And as strong as Dan Braunstein's production is, complete with the beefiest set of tones the band has seen since the Brian Hood days, he does not quite have the natural ear for the vocal harmonies that Grant and Carson did, a key ingredient in helping shape the self-titled into Jesse's landmark vocal album.
Even with “Pale Iris” as its predecessor, “Wave” manages to be the perfect thematic sendoff.
Cure is an album that lyrically draws from a high concentration of bleak media, with the title itself coming from a Japanese psychological horror film. Jesse, out of his adoration for True Detective’s Rust Cole, attempted to pick up Thomas Ligotti’s Conspiracy Against the Human Race and has since adamantly advised against ever reading it due to its poisonous negativity. He had to give up on it entirely because he described it as a “virus”. As a result, this is the closest an ERRA album gets to negative territory. “Slow Sour Bleed” and “Crawl Backwards Out of Heaven” display this the most, with the former even practically name dropping the book, but the darkness runs as a common thread throughout most of the record, with “Rumor of Light” depicting a “world hollowing and frail” and “Idle Wild” coming across as a surrender to hopelessness. What makes “Wave” such a crucially positioned song is it frames the album’s one glimpse of hope as the album’s moment of closure. “Waking up to feel the sunshine” is the last sentence you hear on
Cure, and it feels like the light is finally visible at the end of the tunnel. It’s a beautiful moment of positivity and it stands as one of their most resonant creative decisions ever.
If the self-titled was the full culmination of everything ERRA had done up to that point,
Cure is a full on deconstruction and rebuilding of who they are. It dives headfirst into waters both lyrically and musically uncharted in ERRA’s catalog, while still remarkably keeping the ethos of the prior album intact. It's a fascinating and deeply admirable follow up from a band whose moment in the limelight happened to align perfectly with their lineup's most pronounced surge of synchronicity, and it only further cements the band's confidence in themselves and their creativity.
