KNOCKED LOOSE (USA) – A tear in the fabric of life, 2021 🇬🇧
A traffic accident is, regardless of its final consequences, a traumatic event. The initial bewilderment, followed by the disbelief that it has happened to us, we wait, while the metal bounces between the sides of the road, that everything that happens to us isn’t too grave until we reach the final silence that seems to announce that the nightmare is over. Dealing with the consequences will come later when our mind returns to their original state.
Thousands of incidents like this could be narrated, varying protagonists, settings, and destinations, but they all have one thing in common: Not a single one of the protagonists ever forgets that incident. From the most hypothetical disastrous outcome, the Americans KNOCKED LOOSE have produced this EP about «a car accident, a passenger who dies, the survivor’s guilt and a reunion in death.» An EP that represents more of a (logical) expansion of the KNOCKED LOOSE trademark sound, rather than a simple collection of discards and B-sides, or the excuse of doing some weird-ass shit with the excuse that it is just an EP and not a full length.
Broadly speaking, who does stand the musical proposition of the band, will still not do so (I understand that the shrill voice of Bryan Garris is not everyone’s cup of tea) and more so now, when the band has decided to gradually turn more towards death metal, resulting in 22 minutes of extremely abrasive and cutting material. As a conceptual mini album, it does not stop at any moment, wrapping everything in a very violent and negative environment.
A different shade of blue had a certain variety in its details while their hardcore wasn’t the most extreme or dense available (which wasn’t a low point, but an identity sign), here their approach to deathcore and its breakdowns heavily hit us. Even when the band isn’t playing and they let the samplers tell the rest of the story, everything is feverish and hallucinogenic. «God only knows«, that BEACH BOYS ballad that has remained for the lovely memories of the elderly, here serves as a common thread at various times. But as in those films where they associate a bucolic song with a traumatic event to blur and twist its meaning, everything is rotten and tainted in A tear in the fabric of life, and it shows how well the group tells their stories.
Everything is soaked in death metal, giving new strength to what was already there. That is to say, KNOCKED LOOSE continues to create songs in their own way: The tuning and the type of riffs may have given a substantial change, but deep down everything remains the same, like the nods to mathcore in «God knows» and «Return to Passion«, the abrupt and devastating interludes of «Contorted in the faille«, or how they let go at the end of «Permanent» until the noise devours it all.
There might be my own prejudices, but it is surprising to see how an EP, destined by birth to be a minor release, contains such an elaborate and self-contained mythology, that it even has its own animated medium-length film and whose only defect is that its brevity prevents it from being considered as something much greater, a condition that, due to quality, it undoubtedly deserves.
