Oakland is a rough’n’tumble city that has challenges with crime, urban blight and social disenfranchisement with a depressive hue covering and coating its metropolis.
Alaric are definitely holding a looking glass up to their hometown and by the sounds of End Of Mirrors, they’ve absorbed and taken what’s needed for inspiration for their elegiac style.
Listening to the echoey crawl of the album’s lilting and haunting death rock imagines a shivering and bleak environment in which Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman’s vocal cords are used as a strop, while pointed stabs of aquatic bass and downcast, reverberating guitars set the table for concerned parents’ groups. And they might have a point, as a run on anti-depressives is likely to ensue after airings of morose monstrosities like Wreckage, Angel and Demon. Around the halfway point, the dour essence will begin to play on the nerves of the happy-go-lucky – and the transitions in Adore will drive arrangement-obsessed musicians nuts. Luckily, the upbeat title track throws a little post-punk-infused light on what is a gloriously miserable situation.
