In the five years since Misery Signals’ Controller, metalcore has experienced a commercial death and recent rebirth, so this seems the perfect time for their return. But although Parkway Drive and While She Sleeps have updated the genre’s blueprint, Misery Signals’ sound pre-dates even the original metallic hardcore boom.
Absent Light owes more to earlier innovators like Poison The Well and Cave In and, ironically, sounds all the fresher for it. As well as precision thrash riffs and grizzled vocals there are electronic soundscapes and complex mathcore freakouts.
Shadows And Depth and Two Solitudes deliver the necessary sonic punch to the gut, whilst never compromising on the fragile beauty that marks them out as more than another bunch of big-shorted punks with a couple of At The Gates albums. If you needed a reminder of what made this genre such a big deal a decade ago then you could do a lot worse than picking this up.
