Love Letter Everyone Wants Something Beautiful

Released
28th June 2024
Label 
Iodine
Format

12 Inch

Blue Ice Marble

£24.00

‘Everyone needs a place to go, capsized lives sink to depths unknown, drones circle above while flesh and homes turn to ashes below, the watchers’ eyes remain stoic and cold’ (Late Stage Harm Reduction)

During the bloom of melodic hardcore that shaped much of the US scene in the noughties, there was perhaps one band above all who defined this period for me – Rhode Island’s Verse.  Releasing four albums across Rivalry and Bridge Nine, of which perhaps 2006’s From Anger And Rage was the definitive release, they captured all of the key elements that characterised that particular era – a re-engagement with the musical and political roots of US hardcore, while still calling upon more contemporary metallic influences.

And as Love Letter’s debut album, Everyone Wants Something Beautiful, develops you can’t but help draw comparisons with Verse.  This is not simply due to their powerfully distinctive shared vocalist, Quinn Murphy, but the arrangement of the songs itself.  Hardcore can be forged in many different ways, from the distorted low-end driven to the unbridled guitar barrage.  But Love Letter, as with Verse, craft their songs with the clear intent of pushing the vocals to absolute front and centre.  And this is a weight that Murphy has always proved very adept at carrying.  We live in an age of manufactured, synthetic outrage, which is used to distort, rather than inform, debate.  Yet Murphy serves as the antidote to this – their fiercely rhythmic vocals burn with a palpable, heartfelt sincerity and seethe with an unvarnished rage at the inequities that define our society.

But this is no one person show.  The balance of the band comprises former members of Defeater and Death Of A Nation (including Jay Maas on guitar), and they unleash a furious yet nuanced onslaught.  The cleaner than, perhaps, expected guitars unfurl with a gleaming fluidity, while slab-like eruptions of metallic fury are entwined with bleakly dark melodies and passages of reflective, at times almost post-metal tinged, introspection.  A fluently supple rhythm section expertly harnesses these oscillating dynamics and forms a lock-step partnership with Murphy’s vocals, while inventively layered backing vocals and occasional flares of electronic dissonance add further texture.  Stand out moments are myriad from the cathartically surging Wellness Checks And Dear Friends to the haunting spoken word of Settlements, from the searing Meds And Taxes to the swirling, bristling Late Stage Harm Reduction.

The causes and manifestations of social and economic inequality form the album’s coruscating lyrical core as does a cry for us to recognise the human needs that we all share.  Misanthropic Holiday Or Vacation examines the devastating role of ‘Big Pharma’ in US society (‘Tailored pharmaceutical fits to suit you, until the side effects rip you apart at the seams’), before Popular Memes delves into the twisted logic of the alt-right (‘You conquer and divide to expand the grift – sleep well’), and Unhousing Projects explores the human costs and slow violence of homelessness and the relentless financialisation of housing (‘Eviction sealed fates – a new section-eight waitlist dates lock your mind in a prison’).

Meds And Taxes (‘Can’t pull yourself up by bootstraps you’re under heel’) and Late Stage Harm Reduction (‘We work for less in the name of faux progress – we’ve normalised apathy and callousness’) focus on the relentless exploitation of our economic system.  Settlements (‘An impossible world to love’) then details the horrors of illegal land grabs in Palestine and the dehumanising day-to-day realities of a segregated society – which have, of course, subsequently taken an even more horrific turn.

Something beautiful certainly, but equally something deeply sobering.

—Foundation Vinyl