Artist: While She Sleeps
Album: This Is The Six (Album)
Release Date: Out Now
Unless you’ve been holed up in a dark cave for the best part of the last 12 months you’ll undoubtedly know that there is a lot of hype surrounding While She Sleeps. Following the release of their debut mini album ‘The North Stands For Nothing’ in 2010, the band have gone from strength to strength. Constantly increasing their fan base and earning themselves a reputation as a phenomenal live band following relentless touring, the lads have also found themselves recently being played on daytime Radio 1 by the likes of Fearne Cotton and Scott Mills. This has led to what has felt like a lengthy wait for the debut full length for many fans, but now ‘This Is The Six’ is finally with us, does it justify the much lauded hype?
In a word, yes. ‘This Is The Six’ doesn’t only meet such high expectations but in many ways surpasses them. Loosely filed under metalcore, the album has such a far reaching range of vision and scope that it feels wrong trying to label it. Songs often disregard traditional verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, repeat song structures in favour of songs that take unexpected twists and turns but still retain a great sense of cohesion, such as album opener ‘Dead Behind The Eyes’. The band’s use of dynamics is superb as the album is punctuated with bursts of piano that add a sense of sensitivity to the bludgeoning chaos that unfolds around them. Along with this, the band utilise gang vocals superbly that only enhance the album’s “we’re in this together” mentality. Even the little touches and nuances (such as the slight pause on the likes of ‘Be(lie)ve’) add a brief glimmer of calm before the storm, making those crashing mosh-ready moments even more ferocious. Furthermore, despite its heavier-than-Rick-Waller sound, the album is full of hooks: they may not be conventional hooks, but the meaty riffs on the likes of ‘The Plague Of A New Age’ will stick in your head for days, while the cries of “we are the six” on the album’s title track will have you screaming along until you’re popping to the chemist for a pack of Strepsils.
However, perhaps the thing that makes ‘This Is The Six’ so special is that it is clear that so much passion has been poured into making it that it packs a heavy emotional punch to boot. Frontman Loz Taylor delivers a vocal delivery so intense that whether he is telling tales of growing up on ‘Seven Hills’ or respecting war heroes on ‘Love At War’, there is no denying the man’s conviction and integrity as unshakeable. The many heavy moments on the album are as full of rage as you’d expect, however refreshingly the album has its uplifting moments such as ‘Our Courage, Our Cancer’ and ‘False Freedom’ has a climax that is the most anthemic thing you’ll hear on any heavy album this year.
‘This Is The Six’ is nothing short of staggering in terms of its brilliance. While She Sleeps have created an album that is so exciting that it is sure to pull new fans into the world of rock and metal in their thousands. However it also whips up those feelings of excitement for the more veteran fans of heavy music and will rekindle the way you felt the first time you heard Black Sabbath, Metallica, Slipknot or whoever else may have got you throwing the horns and running like a loon in a mosh pit for the first time. ‘This Is The Six’ has turned out to not only be one of the best heavy albums in recent memory but may also prove to be one of the most important.
10/10
Reviewer: Gavin Lloyd
