Album Review

Early Graves – Red Horse

• 18th Oct 2012

Red Horse is the latest album to come from San Fransico, crust, thrash and grind band Early Graves. No Sleep Records will be releasing the third album on November 5th and 8 track sees the return of the band since the death of founding front man, Makh Daniels 2 years ago and the introduction of John Strachan.

Now I am not familiar with Early Graves or can even say this genre of music makes a usual appearance on my mp3, but either way after hearing this album, this will still be the case. I found the album to be quite boring and an easy listen and in my opinion for a metal band, your ears should be bleeding after half an album from the sheer force of crushing vocals and insane riffs. Obviously if your ears do bleed after any music, chances are you need medical attention, but I doubt you’d forget the song that did it.

The opening track ‘Skinwalker’ is rather exciting but the album seemed to go downhill from then. Repetitive song structures and about 30 seconds too long, each track became tiresome. I wasn’t expecting it at all, but a solely acoustic song popped up, which I wasn’t expecting and I can really feel the emotion behind ‘Day Grows Old’ the way all acoustic songs do.

I can only imagine how hard it must have been for new frontman, Strachan, to replace Daniels and for the rest of the band to record an album without a founding member and my thoughts go out to them 2 years on.

Maybe if I saw Early Graves perform live I could change my mind, but for now I can simply say, this is just an album that I wouldn’t add to my music collection.