Review: Guiltless ‘Thorns’ EP
The EP is a much maligned and vastly underused medium. Whether it allows a young kid to get the essence of an album without spending all of his pocket money (I’m looking at you, Seals The Sense by Paradise Lost) or it allows a spontaneous creative burst between albums, the EP has a special place in my music experience.
The recent rise of vinyl as the plastic of choice for many bands and labels has perhaps had the happy side effect of disrupting the ‘let’s fill a CD right out to its eighty-minute edges’ phenomena of the noughties, but all too often we still get fed filler tracks which never should have escaped the demo tapes. I always feel that a new band testing the water and their respective skills with the recording of an EP is a great idea, and the Thorns EP by Guiltless only serves to confirm this view.
Thorns arrives in the world on 23rd February ’24 via Neurot Recordings and serves as Guiltless’ debut release, but this is hardly the first rodeo of the four members. Amongst their former and current bands they count A Storm Of Light, Intronaut and Generation Of Vipers… so these aren’t kids pissing about with a Peavey Bandit amp in the backroom of a community hall – for them to get together we should assume that something wicked this way comes.
Clocking in at just under twenty-five minutes, but strangely if you absorb it properly in one sitting it feels longer than that. Not because of anything negative, more because by the end of closer In Radiant Glow it feels like you’ve been through the wringer – emerging tired and aching on the other side. The impact and weight that this record has is even more impressive when you take into account that it was all recorded remotely by the four members – apparently not once coming together in the same room. What was expected to be a demo tape during the production process has come out as a fully cohesive piece.
Guiltless bring us a nihilistic and borderline defeatist view of the world on Thorns. Lyrically we are taken through visions of a post-annihilation future, and musically this is heavy, sludgy and industrial. The sound is unlike anyone else that I can name, and I struggled to figure out why that was for weeks. Having lived with the EP for a while, I think the bass-heavy sludge riffs combined with the precise drumming create this unique feel. Whether this is by design or by accident, it sets Guiltless apart.
Thorns is as exciting an introduction to a band that I’ve heard in a long time…
Devour Collide begins with thirty seconds of relative quiet before the first guitar riff drops from a great height. Quickly followed by Josh Graham’s vocals which are harsher than we’ve heard before, but happily still delivering the lyrical message in a way that can be understood and absorbed. ‘No gods, no devils… only noise and scars’, we get the point pretty quickly here!
All We Destroy begins with heavily phased guitars, which serves to enhance the vaguely futuristic and dystopian nature of the whole Guiltless sound. If anything, the track ups the ante further in terms of heaviness. With only four tracks on offer there is really no need for Guiltless to provide any respite, and none is offered.
Dead Eye is perhaps the simplest track in terms of guitar and bass, but it offers some thunderous drumming from Billy Graves which elevates the whole track. This is certainly the bleakest point from a lyrical standpoint – the depths of darkness before the smallest glint of light appears (if you squint really long and hard) with In Radiant Glow. If everything dies then it can only get better, right?
A full-length album is already in the works – with the four band members all now bringing their own presents and presence to the party. Having said how perfectly the EP format fits this level of intensity, I wonder where they will go and how an extended runtime will work. However they end up transforming and sounding in the future, Guiltless will be worth following. Thorns is as exciting an introduction to a band that I’ve heard in a long time.
Label: Neurot Recordings
Band Links: Official | Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: David J McLaren
