Albums That Will #$@&%! Your Face Off in 2014: The Earth Laid Bare, Circadian Rhythms*

January 22nd, 2014 at 3:00pm
David Lee Rothmund

The Earth Laid Bare
Circadian Rhythms
Release Date — ???

Just when I couldn’t possibly be more all-out bored with death/smash/technical/whatever-core, I hear “Divide And Conquer.” The skies open up, it starts raining from the heavens, luscious red carpets roll, and cats and dogs start getting the hell along.

I shall opine: As a band, when you’re playing with the poopy fires of a more or less Very Shitty Genre, you gotta be extra careful to perfectly balance tradition, innovation, and heavy. You gotta sound like you have a fucking purpose while still sounding refreshingly familiar — yet bespoke — to your listeners. They (us) want to hear you, but also your music in context. But above all, you just gotta sound like your jams came blasting right out of your gut, surprise vomit-style, indifferent to but certainly not irrespective of time and place. Those tunes should float right in the airspace between the speakers and the listeners’ faces, effortless, like that airy cloud of perfume left behind the hot chick at the grocery store you didn’t talk to because you were a giant puss.

The Earth Laid Bare has been on my hotlist because they do exactly all those things. And now they’re releasing their first album in the coming months. Yay! There’s this fucking sense of comeuppance to them, a bridled violence vacuum-packed with tight riffage, tight vocals, and tight construction. They take the tropes of their genre and use them to their advantage by using them actually well, rendering the tropes themselves not so tropy and the band itself a pretty good fucking band.

Circadian Rhythms is not going to re-write any rules or invent new ways of playing instruments. It’s going to remind fans and fans-to-be how good the rules sound and how glorious the styles of today can be, when done properly, effortlessly, and genuinely.