CDs available from Philip K Discs at philipkdiscs.bandcamp.com/album/inver; tapes available from Euphoriadic at euphoriadic.bandcamp.com/album/inver

"...crunching waves of sound that are likened to being slowly crushed in a vice." - Simon Kirk, Sun-13

Adzes announces their sophomore LP Inver, building on their prior work at the nexus of sludge and post-metal with the incorporation of influence from alt rock, shoegaze, grunge, and even some dub elements. The title comes from a word of Gaelic origin, meaning the confluence of water with another body of water. The duality of the title meaning a confluence but implying an inversion offered a rich lyrical and thematic bed for the music contained here: the focus is as much on the way moves in its atypical and often confounding rhythm as much as the introduction and resolution of contradictions that happens through our lives. The implication here also nods toward the general shape of dialectics as a whole, a rich bed for an already leftist band to incorporate those themes a bit more organically rather than in the shape of raw polemic.

The idea of a band rooted in post-metal making a record themed after water may bring to mind not only the rich history of that topic in this space, ranging from groups like Isis and Cult of Luna to newcomers like Mur, but also that of winding and epic track lengths and structures. Not so here; Forest Bohrer, sole member of Adzes, specifically drew not only sonic textures such as approaches to arpeggiating chords and the movement of chord progressions from alt rock but also those tighter song structures. Adzes embraces not only of more melodic shapes and textural, chordal guitar work but also the specific use of clean vocals, feeling often more like Dinosaur Jr. than The Ocean. There are certain obvious touchstones for this record given his musical lineage, from Isis and Neurosis to Kowloon Walled City and the almighty Godflesh. But newer elements drawn from the heavier modern wing of shoegaze opened the door to explore these new avenues. Recent work from groups like Hum and Cloakroom as well as the classic material from groups like Soundgarden and Medicine provide a basis for more contained but still explosive songwriting.

This is less to say that this record will not find purchase with the predominantly metal-listening crowd as it is to say that the punk- and alt rock-adjacent spaces will find it particularly welcoming. Given previous covers of The Cure and Peter Gabriel, this shift from more obviously metal-indebted work as shown on their debut and especially the perverse heaviness of their material for their split LP with Putrescine is not totally unexpected; it seemed an inevitability that we would get an LP exploring this side of the band. Inver is something new pressaging something even newer, the first steps down an exciting and genre-agnostic road.

- Langdon Hickman, July 2023