AGE OF COLLAPSE:
Burden of Beast: LP
Waves of guitars and distortion come crashing out of your speakers, breaking across the room, decimating furniture, and ruining your carpet. Or something like that. Age Of Collapse have spun a few His Hero Is Gone records in their time, but they’ve built on that structure, put more of a crushing edge in their sound, and added some atmospheric touches to get the point across. I like that they pick up the speed and get into some thrash with songs like “Silver Lining,” as it helps to offset the mainly mid-tempo crawl of the other songs. The riff they kick into on “Hands That Take” is a killer. Fast, jittery, and direct. When they do stuff like this I’m like, “Fuck yeah!! More please!!” as they shift down the speed and move at a moderately hurried gait. Such actions only intensify their sonic power. Plus they have some NWOBHM influences—that come to the fore in the song “Life of Misery”—that make me wonder what they could do if they just went for it and wrote some songs that were more in that vein and less in the punk realm. Then there’s a song like “Final March” which has a cold and dreary introduction that gives way to a head banging riff, eventually going over into blinding speed. But the slower and mid-paced tempos in this song are the ones that crush the most. Opposing dynamics compressed in a short time span, pulled off with good results. –Matt Average (Aborted Society, abortedsociety.com)