Gaerea
Loss
Century Media
Five minutes into their magnificent opening track, Luminary, it becomes quite clear that Gaerea at this point are beyond caring about dividing opinions. Loss is, in essence, a mostly extreme record. This is an excellent thing for the more open-minded metalhead. If you like your blast beats delivered with artistry and real emotional weight, you are in luck. However, if you want frostbitten corpse painted, lo-fi, trve cvlt brutality, then I’d suggest that maybe this isn’t a record for you. Submerged does feature hyper-fast blast beats; however, the guitars glide and swell (my friends in the obscure band Patch Battle Jackets might want to sit down for this), and there’s a catchy, sung chorus! I know! That’s their black metal credentials revoked straight away! For the rest of us, this is the most romantic, tragic and melancholic extreme metal adjacent record you’ll hear this year. The lead single, Hellbound, is as striking and incredible as the band’s live performances.
Fear not, though, there is still plenty here to bang your head to and no matter what the elitists will say, Gaerea are nothing like Sleep Token. The jaw-dropping Nomad, for example is just as heavy as carrying a bass amp up a flight of stairs. Having said that, LBRNTH and Cyclone are fairly balladic and sound more like Download main stage fare than those of a band that played Fortress Festival only a couple of years ago. If you’re still reading this, I strongly encourage you to check out this album. It’s wonderful to see a band willing to be different in the metal scene today. Gaerea tackles true-life and death-related subject matter with the artistry it deserves. In summary, for their vision and ambition alone, Gaerea deserve your attention, and for their mammoth sound and truly exciting delivery, they definitely deserve your ears.
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Reviewed By George Miller