“Imagine the overgrowth.” – Is This Really Happening?
Heavy music will always hold a space in my heart. As I progress through life, my general focus is on the positive and the things that I can do daily to reinforce my thinking patterns that lend to my wellbeing. In general, heavy music tends to lean toward a gloomier outlook. With that said, I cannot deny the feeling that arises in me when I hear the deep and booming soundscape of a well-done metal (generalizing the genre here) album. My head can’t stop itself from bobbing to the beat of a thunderous kick drum lathered up with jaw dropping guitar tones, booming bass and earth-shaking vocals. A lightness appears in me through the mix of a heavy conduit, a smile always plasters my face. It’s a fact, heavy music makes me happy. This is exactly the response that is yielded when listening to the United States –mostly remotely operated–band The Acacia Strain’s new release, Step Into the Light, an enormously sturdy LP, which will no doubt be strongly supplanted into music history to withstand the test of time, held up amongst the higher echelons of all things heavy.
This album brings slow, sludgy riffs matched with low end bass and intense vocal melodies, lots of tempo changes shifting between the previously mentioned sludge and doom metal vibes, to more grindcore elements and D-beat segments, guaranteed to get your head bobbing. This album also holds true to the band’s hardcore upbringing, not only by providing the reminder through its breakdowns, but also by showing its brevity. Clocking in at twenty-three minutes and twenty-eight seconds spanning a total of ten tracks, this album gets in fast and gets out just as quickly, giving the listener what they need while not exhausting the ear–a grand selling point in my eyes.
Typically, bands that come up in the hardcore and metal funnel can be put into two camps. One, the bands that grow soft with age, where each subsequent release lessens in gravity and is more easily brushed aside from awareness. Or two, the bands that get heavier with each record, adding to an already sturdy base working their way up the scaffolding, laying a thicker material with each layer of progression. The Acacia Strain has progressed throughout their musical career by building upon prior releases, using a heavier mortar and stronger brick. What they are constructing is a tower that cannot be denied in the musical realm alongside their peers. The result is a tight, unique architecture that can be distinguished from the rest.
Opening track, Flourishing, begins with a brief fade in of distorted drums, guitar and bass, only to launch the listener into a full assault, a thick and massive wall of sound. Vocalist, Vincent Bennet, gives a brief sense of hope with his opening lyrics as he pushes forward, “Step into the light,” followed by the familiar, but more clear cacophony of instrumentation we had heard previously under the thick blanket of distorted effects. Not only do these lyrics serve as a reminder that you are about to embark on a story that ties directly to the LP’s title, but they also give a potential glimpse into more uplifting lyrical themes. Bennet goes on to say, “The birds will sing, the sun will shine, the only war is in my mind…There is no ceiling, there is no limit.” OK, OK, we got a little hopeful and uplifting lyric out of the gate. Are we to be surprised by the band’s usual tone of disdain for humankind and nihilistic lens? Do not be mistaken dear listener, the following line will wash all hope away to remind us of all the qualms of mankind. Bennet bluntly adds, “There is no future with us in it. The only world peace is an empty globe.” Damn. Even in my own personal preferences of more positive tones, one cannot deny this viewpoint amongst the current state of affairs that we have seen wash throughout our culture. One can’t help but spring forth the question: Does humankind need to not exist in order to unravel and reverse the stress that we humans have put on this planet? I personally have a little more hope than this outlook, but one cannot deny the possibility as the only solution, especially given that we have all been witnessed to truly mind altering and reality shaking experiences in the past ten years. Leaving us to ask: Is any of this real?
The following track, Calf’s Blood, wastes no time at all, reminding us of the band’s grindcore influence, but only for a brief moment as the song’s breakdown appears ten seconds in. The quick and chaotic intro is brushed aside and moves immediately into a curtain of guitar feedback strengthened by a metronome style kick drum, which no doubt pulls a live crowd into awareness, the precursor to something larger. Shortly after, we are graced by the arrival of a slow distorted bass line to match the tempo of the booming tom beats on the drums before driving home with a full band effort of hardcore style guitar progressions and ear tugging kick and tom beats. This builds to a brief, open-ended half-time breakdown filled with crash cymbals and hard-hitting snare while repeating lyrics to match, “I am still bleeding, I am still breathing.”
The Acacia Strain uses their tenure to set the stage for other up and coming bands who are creating music in the same arena. Chain, features vocalist Jacoby Lilly of Nashville based band Chamber. Another assaulting track, one with more traditional hardcore style riffs intertwined. Chain holds brief variations of blast beats before ending on a sluggish breakdown which gives the song’s arch a feeling that we hit on all fronts in just over a minute.
The band further gives a platform on the track titled, Sinkhole, to vocalist Josef Alfonso from the San Jose based band Sunami. This is The Acacia Strain’s longest track on the album, clocking in at three minutes and forty-six seconds. The first thirty seconds of the track gives us only kick, snare, hi-hat, toms, bass and vocals, before launching into full orchestration, followed by a much-welcomed tempo change. This song gives us a more traditional hardcore sound throughout–an homage to their upbringing possibly?
It is hard to deny that this album will go down as an influential piece of art to the greater picture of music. The Acacia Strain has carved out its own path while also pulling influence from some of the field’s most notable bands. According to an interview with Bennet by Hardcore Times, The Acacia Strain’s influences include, “Overcast, Iron Maiden, Meshuggah, Candiria, Slayer, Hatebreed, Arch Enemy… pretty much any band that can bring the rock.” It cannot be argued that Step Into the Light lacks even the slightest ability in “bring[ing] the rock.” The band is without a doubt laying the groundwork for future bands to travel upon. They do so by continuing to create music on a different level, one that does not point in one singular direction of leadership, as evident in Bennet’s list of influences–all metal style bands, each with their own individual and distinguishable sound.
Production quality on this album is superb. One can only imagine the challenging task at producing and engineering songs that vibrate at such a low frequency. When the guitar and bass is down tuned as far as they are on this album, naturally clarity becomes lost. However, Step Into the Light managed to maintain that clarity around the instruments, a well-done job by producer, composer and engineer, Randy Lebeouf, who has worked on other notable albums such as Every Time I Die’s 2016 Low Teens, various Kublai Khan, Thy Art Is Murder, and Wolves at the Gate albums, as well as The Acacia Strain’s 2020 Slow Decay and 2014 Coma Witch.
This review cannot be wrapped up without discussing Step Into the Light’s cover art, created by Caelan Stokkermans, Cleveland, Ohio based freelance artist, and Art Director and Senior Product Manager at Unique Leader Records. One of the incredible aspects to metal, and what can often get overlooked, especially in today’s digital age, is an album’s cover art. The artwork of Step Into the Light, presents a dark, yet elegant oil painting of a wooded scene with a single fallen tree crossing diagonally to the upper right of the image. Centered near the lower half of the image is a nest of baby birds, mouths open, almost frantically volleying to be fed something stringy by their older caregiver. One would only know that the stringy object hanging from the mouth of the adult bird is the scavenged pieces of a nearby dead elk. The image comes from a separate, but equally amazing dark oil painting, also created by Stokkermans, from The Acacia Strain’s three song EP, Failure Will Follow, which was released at the same time and is considered the counterpart to Step Into the Light. Stokkermans offers print versions of both The Acacia Strain’s cover art, which can be purchased on his website (individual art pieces are linked above under the album titles). If you want to obtain the cover art at a cheaper ticket price and while supporting the band, it’s advised to purchase the vinyl edition of Step Into the Light (Failure Will Follow can be found here).
In closing, Step Into the Light offers any lover of metal, grindcore, deathcore, hardcore, whatever core, a palatable and enjoyable soundscape to the ear. It’s filled with fast beats, slow beats and everything in between, but one general consensus is that this album is deep, heavy and full of low vibrational richness that will rattle your ribcage and give you involuntary headbang fits. Bennet’s vocals are perfectly in line with the creative and rich guitar styles laid down by guitarist’s, Devin Shidaker and Mike Mulholland, the thick resonant sounds of bassist Griffin Landa, and thundering drumbeats provided by drummer Kevin Boutot. If you are searching for something new to check out, I highly recommend giving Step Into the Light a full listen. It’s a wonderful companion to your weightlifting session (my chosen method of consumption).
We love music over here at the RDT Headquarters, and this album gets our hard (and heavy) stamp of approval. Go check it out!
In case you missed it, check out episode For the Record…It’s All About VINYL.