Idle Heirs – Life is violence

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7.0

• Band:
  Idle Heirs
• Duration: 00:50:53
• Available from: 11/04/2025
• Label:

• Relapse Records

Streaming not yet available

“Life is violence” is a deceptive title, for the debut album of the Idle Heirs. The output marks the first music step of the singer Sean Ingram from the EP “Oxep” (2009), the last publication of the Coalesce, a small underground legend Mathcore/Extreme Metal of the American panorama in the early 2000s, under the aegis of the Relapse. And it is always the historic American record company that publishes the first test of this new group, a duo that in addition to Ingram sees the participation of the musician and producer Josh Barber.
“Life is violence”, we said, is not properly something gloomy and threatening as its title would make it presupposed: although it has not exactly been of joy, it is a publication that makes the contrary to a mysterious atmosphere, at times even quite rarefied, however not necessarily bombastic or pressing, one of his main qualities.
Stilistically, already at the first impact it is quite simple to frame in which vein the work of the duo is placed, remaining gently trapped in a conception of the post-metal/post-rock in late 90s and early 2000s.
A musicality dating back to the golden years of the ISIS and the first tests of the cult of Luna, with a vintage cut in production – Hispide and not very rounded – and in the dosage of the sound ingredients. The alternation of voids and full, thin and shady melodies interspersed with vented tears of integral hardcore anger, only partially looks at what happens today. A 'dated' patina goes to rest almost instantly on compositions with a few surprises, ordered in development and basically fairly linear such as “Loose Toothe” and “Lemonade Stands”, which from a rhythmic point of view do not give great inventions, keeping on fairly uniform trends and rade complications.
The focal point is in the rags and in the melodic filaments, borrowed from the most traditionalist post-rock, who adorn the individual episodes, giving each of them more related to songs of the 'rock' mold, instead of powerful metal expressions. And it is probably in this sensitivity, linked to the world of alternative rock, that it is worth looking for the key to reading “Life is violence”, thus avoiding having bad for an often compassionate, a little sleepy.
In some very minimal registers, with a clean item to draw shake and delicate lines, we approach the most calm coordinates of The Ocean, or to the most intimate neurosis; At all disguised, not to be found between the lines, but rather explicit. So everything, initially, appears all too predictable, not very personal, pulled a bit for the long and without those inventions that can make, for example, the recent works of names such as the aforementioned Cult of Luna or the amenra.
“Life is violence” seems more to pay homage to the 'post-together sounds as a whole, instead of seeking its well-defined dimension. By granting time and breathing the album, however, he knows how to assert himself, letting his suffused charm emerge, a pale and shy musicality.
Although philological operation is in remembering the salient features of the post-metal movement in his pioneering years, almost without realizing the compositional qualities of the duo-veterans of the scene and from musical knowledge, not only metal, very large-they jump out, making listening much more comfortable and satisfying than it might seem at the first bars.
The clean vocal lines of Ingram, to remember a fragility similar to that of screenam, do a lot in the abdominal compositions, giving them an emotion that does not know at all of mannerism, but of an intense communicative need. The most soft arias, at the limit of the Shoegaze, of a song as “rare bird” make us breathe a reassuring atmosphere, well balanced by more predictable but not unimlated instrumental explosions.
The album is growing, going to touch changing and stratified trends in “Dim Shepherd” and “Dead Ringer”, which between arpeggiati, discharged, veiled sadness, manage to breach the hearts of the most elderly post-metallers.
Without phenomenal flashes of genius, but with style and competence, the idle heirs make us relive a way of understanding metal a little out of fashion, yet still significant for what he knows how to transmit. A welcome jump back in time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ililoju0k598