Album Review: CLEARxCUT - "Age of Grief"

Boy, metalcore can be an unforgiving genre, can’t it?  Many have tried, and few have succeeded, to truly find the proper balance that can cater to the stringent, fan-imposed boundaries of metal and hardcore and furthermore produce some art that appeals on more than an academic level.

The Germans CLEARxCUT, here embarking on their third album, make one of nobler attempts in recent years to bridge all gaps and still sound idiomatically their own.  This new effort, “Age of Grief,” makes a lot of mileage by slowing down the pace, which seems counterintuitive to the fashionable blast beats of modern metal and the time-honored tradition of hardcore songs not overstaying their welcome.  

“Burial Shroud,” despite being the second song we’re presented with, is truly the launching point of the offering, as it extols the virtues of the careful pacing referenced above.  CLEARxCUT doesn’t make the song into something it shouldn’t be – it moves not carefully but comfortably, easy in its movements and accented by a clean guitar tone that separates from the buzz of the rhythm and slurred beat of the percussion.

The record’s third cut, “Against Leviathan,” is the album’s best and where CLEARxCUT shines brightest both in the study of their own craft, and in the fusion of seemingly alien elements into a whole that forms strong chemical bonds.  Where CLEARxCUT excels is in simplicity; it would have been easy, and dare we say creatively lazy, for the band to simply crush a bunch of overdriven notes into a small suitcase, press it to a digital track and walk away feeling accomplished.  Instead, the band does more by doing less – the guitar riffs, such as they are, are single-note affairs, played at a walking pace, and never is this more apparent than in “Against Leviathan;” as the song shifts into a second gear, the riff is already familiar and embedded to the listener.  When it ultimately recedes into the background, its echoes still influence and color everything that happens after.

This theme of careful note selection and sparse, open-space riffing continues through the duration of the record, from “Unwritten” to “Privilege” and all the way at the end with “The Eternal Demise.”  It makes for a record for which the simple sobriquet of “metalcore” feels inaccurate, if not deceptive.  Not to say that “Age of Grief” isn’t a metalcore record, but only that there’s more to it than that, a greater sense of craft and artistic expression.

CLEARxCUT’s new album doesn’t steer entirely clear of rocky trails, however.  In a way, the album is a victim of its own best features, as the pace and simplicity which so capably set it apart from its contemporaries also results in a feeling of sameness as the record runs its course.  It took multiple listens to get to the point where anything besides “Against Leviathan” stuck in the memory in a significant way.  The other eight cuts are all permutations of a theme; a successful theme, to be sure, but a repetitive one.  When listening, the nuance of “Age of Grief” is likely best experienced without the intrusion of cumbersome outside distractions, but moments like that feel hard to come by in our modern, hectic lives.

“Age of Grief” should be lauded for its profound, anti-Newtonian discovery of the idea that the best way to blend two fast-moving objects may be to slow down and allow the pieces to breathe and find synergy.  The best moments of the album are highly enjoyable, but in many ways, we are still at best left with the taste of an album that is interesting mostly from an academic perspective.