Review Summary: how to name your screamo band: a guide
2024 has been a superb year for skramz. Our front page has been scattered with archetypal album/artist combos every month -
your sister was a ghost by
i once knew a fireman,
we lost our floss in the sea by
I think i require dental care, etcetcetc - each sure to strike a shiver of catharsis down the spine of even the most hardened sad-screm enjoyer. There have been so many releases, in fact, that some absolute gems have slipped through the cracks. Enter Bloom Dream.
The Florida-based sorrow-salesmans’ debut LP sounds like it should be their fifth, such is the well-oiled polish that pervades the entire clamorous hellstorm. Opener “No Tomorrows 1999” says it all: eerie Sopranos sample into earthquaking vox into howling riffs into drums that fuck. Every element gnashes, wielding noise and distortion as emotional battering rams, and owing as much to post-hardcore (of the thick, Drive Like Jehu variety) as they do to Orchid and the like. Witness, for example, the weird riffs and web-like song structures on “Community Service” and “State Idols”, both finding incredible pockets between melody and dissonance as they spin their whiteknuckled skramzscapes. “Gilded Crowns” takes things further, smacking of a mathtastic Botch cover, hurling hulking knotty grooves all over the shop to deliver a textbook therapeutic romp.
The result is loud, high energy, perfectly produced, and pumped full of so much palpable rage as to allow suspension of belief. You become convinced that these are more than songs, but the feelings inside, the terror and the turmoil, all those dark places that I have been, the stubborn wounds, lost friends, tired regrets and the rest of it. It’s here, all of it, and the closer, “Violence”, is the epitome: the harrowed bellows, the quaking fuzz, the whole shuddering cacophony, hitting the buttons, goosing the bumps, tearing me apart, with a mad grin and finger twitching in the direction of replay replay replay replay replay replay—
—which is why
It Didn’t Have To Be This Way is my favourite screamo of the year. Over every other release, it’s Bloom Dream that I find myself reaching for first to take the edge off. Endlessly spinnable and woefully heavy, it’s a masterclass in everything the genre should be, even if it may lack quite as spine-tingling a title as
the implosion of the louvre or
how i ate my carpenter. Bloom Dream, if you’re reading this, I offer rebranding services on a fixed fee basis.
