Album Review: Heartist – Feeding Fiction
2 min read
Southern Californian hardcore band Heartist is on a mission to bring “real, honest emotion into heavy music”, and their first full-length album – Feeding Fiction – is a pretty decent way to start.
Feeding Fiction is essentially comprised of clean vocal that sound as though they belong in the garage of a grunge band back in the nineties doused in a vat of high-adrenaline electric guitar breakdowns and heavy drum beats- musical synonyms for the heavy metal genre. Anthemic, emotion-laden choruses infuse each track with a sense of raw monumentality – capable of provoking even an elevator full of professional businessmen to burst into a spontaneous mosh pit.
Lyrics have been deemed crucial by Heartist in their quest to produce genuine, “honest emotions” in their music, and mirror the passionate and embittered sound of Feeding Fiction. Lyrically, tracks fall into the category of either a siren song befitting of a Marvel Superhero movie or an incensed rant over the nature of today’s music industry. The band also attempt to delve into highly personal topics such as teenage suicide with the lyrics to Demons being the internal ramblings of someone who has just committed suicide – an issue conventionally confronted by a genre often associated with doom and gloom.
Album opener, What Kind of World is spiked with enough energy Spiderman could swing around New York listening to. This adrenaline is sustained throughout the album, concentrated especially in Manipulate – an angry rant against the ex-lead singer of the band and Black Cloud. Unbreakable, see the band experimenting with lead singer Bryce Beckley’s capacity to sound like a 16 year old experiencing a testie-pop, with the song saved by it’s immediate segue to an impressive guitar solo.
Ready To Change hints at Heartist’s potential to create authentic acoustic tracks. Opening with a moody acoustic harmony, the track giving listeners merely a minute break from the onslaught of aggressive sound carried through the album before exploding into a racket of chaotic guitars.
The bands unique take on such a clichéd genre stems from their ability to find a middle ground between iconic heavy metal bands such as Avenged Sevenfold and Bullet For My Valentine and nineties grunge outfits like Nirvana. While each track harbors a similar sound that causes song to blend into one another, Feeding Fiction makes a brilliant soundtrack to have on one of those days where 98% of things that happen manage to annoy you.
