Album Review

Ashcorn – Visions For Your Instinct

• 17th Aug 2009

Original visions of the future were often seen as being unrealistic and unattainable, clear white corridors, the populous happy, without war or conflict, every human condition analysed and treated-we would never have any problems again-only that wasn’t believable-these were progressive ideologies that in the end never came to fruition.

The most realistic depiction of the future was beneath a steel sky, clouded in grey, a cyberpunk graffiti world were the appliances invented to make our world better, failed and turned on us, where the human frailties showed through and faults that will forever scar mankind’s psyche became an abyss for the hopeless to fall onto.
With ‘Visions for your instinct’ Ashcorn present a vision to what could become reality, a mezzanine into how long-standing themes of war, madness, government and reality may develop and evolve, it is the sound of a band about to slit it’s wrists at where technocracy could take us and then pulling it’s self from the brink and recovering.

One of its closet dark brothers is Fear factory’s ‘Obsolete ‘with its concept of a bleak all albeit far flung future.
There is so much rich use of sampling, from sirens to radioactive ticks that it could have descended into white noise and garbled messages, but there’s such a delicate dispersal of them that they embody taste, and do exactly what a sample should do-pillar the music. Predator sounds mixed with Terminator effects, alarms wailing in the background with acid rain covering everything. It allows the movement between songs to become smooth and involved whilst pulling everything together and opening up the material onto a wider canvass.

Producing a dense guitar sound that’s closest to colliding machines sometimes leaves the music soulless-a criticism often levelled at Fear factory and indeed industrial metal as a whole, but if Reznor has proven anything it is that this is avoidable if treated with diligence and integrity and on ‘Night fable’ one of the best riffs on the album storms through and pins your head to the wall with its weight, clarity and concrete groove.

Miles rarely plays solos and chooses to only step into the (Dark) light when absolutely pivotal to the song, it’s a skill most do not possess-playing for the song, and ‘Night fable’s playing is the machine working perfectly.
The access point for Ashcorn is Tommy’s vocals, as where other luminaries would simply growl and fight through the material, Tommy chooses to open up the music with some extremely intimate performances. When piano and keyboards enter songs it’s a synergy that can sometimes bury heavy singers, but Tommy changes his attack accordingly and works with and beyond to make the music convincing and memorable.

There are still moments of sheer metal here, despite the interesting tangents and ‘Global lie’ with its bark of ‘We are all puppets!” could well have been Metallica remixed.
An album considering topics and themes with lines like ‘Loneliness embrace my soul’ can sometimes leave the listener disenchanted and cold, and it’s Ashcorn’s success that this is not the case with ‘Visions for your instinct’ it’s with life and hope that Ashcorn finish, not total despondency, stripping the walls of humanity down and then attempting to start again.