Lower Automation

Lower Automation

Written by: PP on 23/01/2022 12:09:43

Hailing from Chicago, Lower Automation will take you back to the origins of post-hardcore and mathcore with frequent references to classic work by At The Drive-In, Since By Man, and The Fall Of Troy on their self-titled debut album. It's a record that's best described as a spastic piece of chaotic music, where the insect-like guitars swirl and twirl in seemingly every direction at once, whilst the vocals offer a particularly volatile and explosive, altogether unmelodious take on clean singing.

Some of you may remember the criminally underrated cult classic "Pictures From The Hotel Apocalypse" by Since By Man, and that's about the closest reference you can come up with concerning Lower Automation's sound. Despite the constant barrages of labyrinthine riffs and layers upon layers of chaos, there's a tight structure within that barely holds the expression together. It's classic mathcore with polyrhythms and recurring time-signature changes, resulting in a complex soundscape that requires multiple active listens to properly unfold.

That being said, tracks like "Old Sparky" are a little more on the conventional side (if you can call any Lower Automation song conventional, that is). Here, the band sounds like At The Drive-In on circa "Relationship Of Command", which means we're more in post-hardcore mode than spazz-core. But then again on "Dread", the band goes all-in on The Fall Of Troy style guitar virtuoso, and there are even references to the most experimental material by Fear Before The March Of Flames in the process.

In short, "Lower Automation" is not for the faint-hearted. While not necessarily a heavy album as such, its atmosphere feels loaded with nitroglycerin in the sense that it might detonate any second. It means you're constantly on your toes as the band experiment with weird stop/start segments and complex instrumentals much like The Dillinger Escape Plan did on "Calculating Infinity", for example. A solid refresh on what the early 2000s sounded like.

Download: 6 Degrees From Phrenology, Old Sparky
For the fans of: Since By Man, At The Drive-In, The Fall Of Troy, Fear Before The March Of Flames, (old) The Dillinger Escape Plan
Listen: Facebook

Release date 12.07.2021
Zegema Beach Records

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