‘Profit is everything amidst a crumbling vile decay.  They don’t care; just useful plebs in their power game’ (Those Who Gave Us Yesterday)

Let’s be honest if you are not even a touch angry with the state of the world, then you have not been really paying much attention.  A silver lining, and a rather welcome one at that, is that this bleak state of affairs has provoked a return to action for Boston’s The Hope Conspiracy.  Featuring current and former members of All Pigs Must Die, Harvest, Paint It Black, and The Suicide File, the band was originally active during the noughties, releasing three albums, and a slew of EPs.  Following their return with last year’s Confusion/Chaos/ Misery EP, this is, in fact, the band’s first full-length since 2006’s Death Knows Your Name.  And time has only stoked their fury.

As the ominous opening riff to Those Of Who Gave Us Yesterday unfurls over wailing air raid sirens you brace yourself for what is to follow – roared, impassioned vocals, wisps of sombre melody overlay menacing groove-laden riffage that feeds into a punishing chorus, while a thunderous rhythm section unleashes an almost tribal barrage.  And the intensity never diminishes as the band evoke a relentlessly desolate, claustrophobic atmosphere.  This brutal battery is leavened by flourishes of discordant melody and passage of dissonant foreboding, from the surging The Prophets And Doom to the slab-like Shock By Shock, and from the bruising The West Is Dead to the unsettling The Specter Looms.

This is an album literally steeped in rage – every sinew of its being is straining to challenge the distorted priorities of our age.  The mirage of our increasingly zombified democracies, their knowing capitulation to the rapacious demands of capital, and the resultant exploitation and oppression are the defining themes, ‘A tragic noose, tight around all our necks’ (Of A Dying Nation).